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SKY CATCHER

Part 2 Project 2000
John O'shea
University of Westminster | UK
The approach to my thesis project started with an investigation into notions of stasis and movement executed through form/space studies .
The year developed into an intention of harnessing the more poetic qualities of Architecture, using THE SKY as the motivating theme.

SKY CATCHER
The Idea is to heighten the perception of the sky through representation of the physical, scientific and emotional effects the Sky generates.

The Straegy is through a space progression which starts at a point of stasis on the the ground, and culminates in a space of anti-gravity beyond.

The Form is a metaphor for movement, from stasis into total release, through fragmentation, dematerialisation and exposure. As in a condition from potential energy to kinetic (actual). the architecture is a metaphor for the ephemeral condition of the Sky.

the spatial sequence.....................

THE VACUUM - point of stasis, stillness, slow time.

THE TRANSFORMATION SPACE (studio) - a place where feelings, emotions from the Sky are transformed into representation on canvas.

THE SPACE OF THE SKY - a culmination of physical and phenomenological experience.
The space of The Sky is a space where one sees into but cannot reach or control.......................A METAPHOR FOR THE SKY.

the atmospheres and ideas in the project are translated to the observer through the poetic qualities of space....................... A celestial world beyond our everyday.




John’s huge volume of work shows a clear mutation of form into programme out of a large series of exploratory spatial exercises. His design research employed a considerable range of media, computer renderings, hand drawings and an exemplary ‘collection’ of models in resin, plaster,metal,perspex and card at both a detail level and in total composition. The fluidity suggested in the resin models gave way to an obsessive elaboration in the project of penetrating forms and overlaid planes. Rather than letting these spatial essays remain in the abstract realm with great skill they were projected into a context through the medium of what John calls ‘Sky Catcher’. This poetic structure/series of spaces not only reverberates with the language of some avant-garde early 20th.cent painting but is directed to the sky, a zone inhabited by the circulations and movements of the stars and the clouds and by satellites on which so much of our contemporary world relies .Nature and the digital collide in the spectacular quivering fragmented form and drift through it to sprawl on the land below.

2000
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