Before Russel and Mary Wright settled onto the site that is now Manitoga, it was an abandoned rock quarry at the Lower Hudson Valley. With that in mind, the title of our project is "Laurentia." The rock found in this region of upper New York state is mainly from the Pre-Cambrian Era, and in that time period, what is now much of the East Coast of North America stretching to Greenland was the super continent of Laurentia. Just as this supercontinent was a part of the whole that was Pangea, we wanted to imply that our monolith could be the remains, one of the parts of an historical whole, and named it as such—Manitoga's geological roots are applied to the studio's overall part-to-whole discourse.
In response to the topic of part-to-whole, our group focused on mimicking the monolith. Monoliths are characterized as large single blocks of stone, that usually served as a pillar or monument. However, we break down the monolith as an autonomous object. Our monolith reveals that it is actually a whole made up of many smaller parts, seen on the interior. This can be seen in the section, as well as the differences between the interior and exterior renders. The part-to-whole relationship is the aggregation of smaller, "high-res" components on the inside, to make up the big "low-res" monolith seen on the exterior.
The smaller components that make up these aggregations were originally our individual group members' assigned Russel Wright artifacts from the American Modern collection: the celery tray, the cream and sugar holder, the divided bowl and the creamer. In direct correlation with the switching between resolution, we go down in scale and the supposed high-res components are actually low-res reductions of the American Modern pieces. The simplification process can be seen in the reduction diagrams.
Russel Wright rejected the superfluous and aristocratic snobbery of the American home in his 'Guide to Easier Living.' His pursuit for a simpler yet more elegant modern American home led to a design ethos that was highly reduced from the popular culture of the 1950s. We took this ideology applied it onto our project in close ties with the part-to-whole studio discourse. Our project takes the site Manitoga's geological history, Russel Wright's ideologies, and the Part-to-Whole discussion, and the result is our monolith-pavilion, Laurentia, which could be placed in multiple locations around the quarry, guiding the visitors through the site - mysterious objects that would sometimes reveal their softly glowing interiors. To quote the philosopher Timothy Morton, "we can never see all the dimensions of a thing at once. Things are what they are independent of us, yet never as they appear. Things are tricky, playful."
