Fresno Art Hop Reimagined

I. Describe Fresno’s Context

The current state of Fresno, California is not exactly a cultural city. Its function as a small farming community and aesthetic resides in the 19th century. Fresno is often driven past on the 99, but is hardly a destination. So what is needed is a therapeutic act delivered by an architectural intervention, a way of changing the experience from a functional city into a social and cultural city. What is needed is a scheme for a museum. Fresno’s only museum closed down on January 5, 2010 and as a result, local artists have been using various businesses throughout the city as art galleries. This event is known as Art Hop. Art Hop is the foundation for my project.

Introduction

a. What am I doing?

My project focuses on the decentralization of a museum and the creation of physical and perceptual connections throughout the city.

b. How are you doing it?

The main objective is to re-approach the design of a shopping mall, museum-typology.

-the strategy I have focused on includes:

*Developing a ‘mega-museum’ by joining various parts of existing museums together.

*Then, dispersing the parts of that museum throughout downtown Fresno in areas of the city that are undervalued or underused, changing the program around each building into art-based functions.

c. Why are you doing it?

Working in this way, I hope to challenge the archetype of a museum as a tiresome, artificial and redundant visitable sequence of galleries into a pilgrimage that exists to create new encounters and relationships with art and the city. Downtown Fresno is no longer isolated blocks of program but instead, linked together as though it were a building.

II. Besides dispersal, another major tactic for creating the forms of the buildings is a multiple massing strategy, first based on program and then on a reactive form of contextualism.

-Program and square footage is derived from the Tate Modern.

-Dispersal allows for different types of art in each gallery in order to keep the museum goer moving throughout the city.

-The deformation of the program masses are direct reactions to their particular site and attempt to capture a duality in its form and function. For example, alleys become filled. Interiors are landscapes, rooms are outside.

e. In conclusion.

An interesting by-product of the dispersal of galleries was an immense variety of museum types all within one museum.

1. An addition

2. A ground up construction

3. A re-use. Similar to the Tate Modern, DeYoung, and Walker Art Center.

d. Another product of the dispersal of galleries was the transformation of a city from a functional city into a cultural landscape.

III. The presentation

I chose to present the renders of the pavilions as monochromatic digital prints with and image of the building represented in order to unite each render to the other. I then used six panels as a medium to present the renders. I sculpted the panels so that they emphasized the characteristics of the building it had to present. I then positioned the pieces in a way that suggested movement in order to see all of them much like the project itself does with each gallery and also further sculpted the presentation medium to react to the panel next to it. Every move made was to emphasize a perceptual unity of all the elements of the presentation. The goal is to create a duality of render and sculpture, abstract and representational, and to connect multiple renders (6) perceptually in order to provide another way to interact with, read, and experience a render. These are not the Drawls which are a physical model/drawing, these are a way of presenting both the representational forms of the buildings and the abstract essence and characteristics of each building and the project as a whole.