3D sketching
Sunday, January 29th, 2006Our first design assignment in Furniture Design class is taken from Elements of Design: Rowena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships, by Gail Greet Hannah. The book discusses the life of Rowena Reed Kostellow, who taught industrial design at Pratt Institute for more than 30 years and developed a course of study which she called “foundation.” Apparently, similar courses are now used in design classes around the world.
Rowena Reed Kostellow’s belief was that three-dimensional designs should be sketched three-dimensionally, not two-dimensionally. The tools of her studios were clay, cardboard, wire, glue, and so forth, not paper, pencils, and markers. She felt that 3D sketching reflects “the direct visual experience of the thing, how forms and spaces and movements ‘speak’ to one another” (page 46).
Our first exercise, adapted from this book, was to create 25 small sculptural compositions of three volumes each, using Sculpey or another modeling material. The parameters of the assignment were:
- Each volume must be linear, not curvilinear.
- Each volume must be different from all the others used in the exercise.
- One of the volumes in each composition must be “dominant,” one “subdominant,” and one “subordinate.” The dominant volume must be the most prominent and have axial movement. The subdominant volume must respond to the dominant volume and complement it. The subordinate volume must complete the idea.
- Each composition must incorporate one of three joints: “cradling” (a rabbet joint), “wedging” (one piece fits into another in a non-joint way), or “piercing” (one volume pierces another).
- Each composition must convey one of a given list of 25 emotions, for example anxiety, playful, strong, trusting, confused, victorious, and so forth.
This exercise was annoying at first because I couldn’t easily connect the little Sculpey shapes with the emotions we had to depict. How can one convey “patience” with three little shapes of clay? So I simply sat down to work and let the compositions happen and, interestingly, they began to acquire emotional qualities. I had trouble making my volumes completely linear – the soft Sculpey tended to move and bend as I tried to form it, taking on curvilinearity. Some of my earlier attempts had to be re-done and some of the compositions don’t adequately describe the emotion I assigned to them.
Click here to see my little compositions, plus a few from a similar exercise.
Overall, however, I think this was an excellent exercise. In the first two and a half years of my interior design program, we’ve only been taught two dimensionally. While drafting and rendering are important skills, interior designers, like architects, are responsible for three dimensional spaces. Although I haven’t done a survey of architecture programs, my sense is that architecture students have a great deal of exposure to 3D sketching, table-top modeling, and even full-size building projects. If interior designers are to be taken seriously in the architecture and design community, interior design programs need to have the same emphasis. We need to learn how to sketch, model, and build in 3D in addition to the 2D training we receive.
It looks like Furniture Design is going to be more than furniture – it’s going to give me some much-needed basics in 3D design.