Marist College, Poughkeepsie New York… for Robert A. M. Stern Architects

You should see 33 different shades of grey here. If your highs are blown out, or the lower end is all black, then the images here will not be displayed as they were intended on your monitor. Some adjustment to your brightness and contrast may be necessary.

I have been working pretty steadily, but everything has been fairly confidential.  These images were just released, though. They are maybe (the oldest of them anyway) 18 months old. All of these images are under copyright, with all rights reserved.  If you would like higher resolution copies, feel free to contact me by way of a comment below.

These were done in separate suites, so they don’t necessarily all work together as one suite.  Maybe three or four were done at a time for differing aspects of the total project, which started in masterplanning and moved on to address individual buildings.

As part of the initial master plan study, which included four aerials (not included here), one of the academic buildings was developed a bit and rendered in three or four quick pencil sketches.

Proposed Academic Building at Marist College, Robert A. M. Stern Architects

For a year maybe, I’ve been using a detail from this for my banner at the top of this page, here’s a tighter detail, below.

Detail of the above, about 3x3 inches

A few exteriors, and a quick interior, helped to establish a preliminary direction for the design.

Enlargement from a Street View of the Proposed Building, this detail about 7x5 inches

12x14 Enlargement from a View of the rear Terrace, which faces the Hudson River overlooking a long slope down to the river's edge

...a Detail, about 4x5

4x4 Detail of the same image, showing the texture of the stonework and vocabulary of the masonry openings

Lobby of the same building, this sketch at about 11x17

Detail of the Lobby Image, looking through the space out past the Terrace to the Hudson River beyond.

View of a Proposed Academic Building across from the Hudson River

As I mentioned, the original master plan series included four aerials, showing the development of the campus in stages.  This sketch above was a view done as a follow-up to the aerials, showing one of the academic buildings stepping down from the upper campus toward the river.  The recently constructed library is at rear right, with part of the campus spilling down to the river front.

A detail (about 2x2) from the same view, showing the natue of the stepped massing.

Another view of this same building, from the right, on the slope and in front of the Library, was taken in near elevation.

View of the Academic Building from the sloping lawn in front of the existing Library (upper right)

Detail of same, about 4x5

A later component of the project was the study of an expansion to the sports complex, including playing fields, indoor practice facilities,  and the Athletics Hall of Fame.

Aerial view of the expanded Sports Complex and Hall of Fame, from the East, with the Hudson River at top

View of the Same, from the North

Detail, about 4x5

Within the complex was proposed a Hall of Fame, its Lobby connecting it to the practice facilities and administration areas of the Athletics Program.

Sketch Perspective of the Hall of Fame Lobby, about 12x12, in pencil

Detail, about 3x4 inches

For me, the most challenging sketch of this small group of images was the Hall of Fame itself.  I wanted to illustrate what I thought could be a poignant story… A prospective student is meeting with the Director of the Basketball program and his parents, discussing his possibility of enrolling at Marist. The student’s mother and father sit quietly, on the other side of the table, biding time and letting their son enjoy the attention perhaps, but ready to ask the hard questions just the same, in case he doesn’t.  Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I think that an image feels more successful, more engaging, when there is something going on besides simply straight-forward picture-taking.

Pencil sketch of the Hall of Fame, about 12x12 inches

Detail, about 4x6. I tried to imply a little "immaturity" in the figure of the student, giving him the height of an adult, but still making him seem a young man, hand in pocket, nervously listening.

Detail of the Hall of Fame sketch, about 4x3. For me, the quality of light, specular highlights, and materiality were all driven by the way the large window would light the space. Reflections from the table, and the water pitcher and glasses, gave me a chance to introduce highlights which make the space feel day-lit, instead of merely illuminated uniformly from above.

Part of the impact of the master plan would be new and altered pedestrian and vehicular traffic patterns.  A series of sketches was done to study possibilities for entrance gates to the campus, and a new pedestrian tunnel which dipped under a very busy divided way .

Study for a pedestrian tunnel and an existing gate house, about 9x16 inches in Pencil

Detail of the existing Gate House, with some existing trees

A proposed entrance gate, at about 10x16 inches, in pencil

You don’t see many renderings with traffic lights and telephone wires… I think it lends a veracity that is refreshing.  I hate idealizing things all the time and scrubbing out the quotidian stuff that seems oddly missing some times.  I like these signals, and how the uppermost right wire helps determine the limits of the composition.

A detail, say 3x6

Proposed Entry Gate

...and a last detail, about 3x4

This last suite of images was done perhaps a year or so after the first loose masterplan sketches. Their slightly more realistic feel represents the fact that the project was well underway, fully considered, and at a point where we knew more about the work.  They also deal directly with work that is being integrated into existing surroundings, and so a little closer hewing to what is “real” seemed appropriate.  In all, the work comprises maybe 20 images, spread out over about a year’s time.

en Charrette, and on Charrette™

New Year’s Day morning, having a cup of coffee at our friends’ house, my knee was nervously going up and down under the breakfast table. I knew how much work I had to do this month and how little time I had to do it. I was already panicked. It was going to be an old school charrette.

We hurried home, and I sat down in the chair in my studio, opened up a model I had just received, and got to it.  New Year’s Day, 2010. “Let’s go…”

Yesterday, the 20th, I sent off the last of eleven formal renderings, at 6:30pm.  Between the first of January, and yesterday, I left the house a total of three times, and for no more than an hour and a half each time.  Whew… What a way to start the year. And now I think they want maybe 10 more. Yikes.

Cross-hatched Sky Detail... January 2010

This is about all I can show, a small patch of sky (above), which is maybe an inch wide in the original.

It was a mad charrette. The traditional definition of “en charrette” is that one is “working furiously, continuously, often overnight, up to the very last moment possible, on an architectural design presentation”.  I managed to avoid all-nighters, but I had a run of 16 to 18 hour days that lasted the last two weeks straight.

The idea of a “charrette”  comes from the Beaux Arts schools in mid to late 1800s Paris, where students would work in a mad fury, literally up to the deadline, and would continue to put finishing touches on their drawings even as the “charrette” or cart was brought around and their work was collected.  Cries of “charrette!” warned students of the advancing cart and, with it, the deadline.

My Charrette Tape Ball, about 8 years old, with some "dead soldiers" (pencil points used to their absolute tip)

In the late 60’s a pair of grad students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design convinced their art supply sources to help them set up a shop, on Brattle Street I believe, to sell drafting supplies to architects and architecture students.  It thrived. They named it “Charrette”.  It was the lifeline for nearly every single architect in Boston or Cambridge during the 70s, 80s, 90s…    Swiss, french, german equipment, obscure tools, (then) difficult to find paper, yellow trace, pens, leads, etc.  All to be spun into architecture by practicing or paper-architects.

Enter the personal computer. And after a faltering few years, Charrette is shuttered.

In December I got a call about some emergency work, possibly reworking or redoing a series of illustrations I had previously done for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The design had been furthered, and so we were thinking there might be a run of illustrations required. I shot over (7 miles away) to Charrette.  They’d been trailing off in terms of attention and service in the past few years, but it was still THE place to get supplies.

As I pulled in, I thought to myself that “someday I’m going to find out that they’ve stopped making these pencils”, the prismas.  [Note the pencils nubs in the photo above. Yes, those are truthfully how far down I manage to sharpen and use them.  I'd tell you how, but I'd have to kill you.  My cubby at CBT had them in the tens,  arrayed like punji sticks along the top of the partition, keeping interlopers at bay].

After arriving at Charrette, in desperate need of supplies, I pulled up to the door where I could see a sign. “CLOSED”.  A small notice explaining that they were done.  That was it.  “Thanks for 33 great years”. Discontinued pencils, hell.  They closed the whole damn store.

I sat there in the car, engine off, briefly stunned. Took it much harder than I would have had imagined.  In the past couple years, Charrette seemed a pain.  You’d pick out something and take it to the counter only to find that they didn’t know the price, or that three were priced differently than the rest.  Or that no one could answer a question.  Still, I couldn’t imagine it vanishing. And yet it was gone.

Still, a big boy, I got over the close of Charrette pretty quickly, and ordered some stuff from Utrecht, delivered to my door.  >shrug<

But yesterday, well yesterday I reached for my tape dots. The box is a dispenser, and as I pulled the paper tape to take another dot, the tape pulled free, clean.  Empty.  No Charrette tape dots.  And then it hit me again… Uh OH.

You see, that tape ball above is about 8 years old.  When I rejoined CBT after a brief stint with a buddy of mine in his shop, that ball was started day-1.  It’s 100% Charrette dots.  Not because of some rigid dictum, but simply because that’s where CBT (and I) got supplies.

It’s deceptively small, say four-and-a-quarter inches in diameter, but very dense, very heavy.  Rather than just stick a used draft dot to it, I stick them on and every now and then roll the thing under my foot to compress it, actually standing on it.  It’s solid, more than a couple pounds.  I calculated (for grins) that it contains some 13,000 used draft dots. Even though it’s not every dot I have used in that time, it still represents more than 3000 drawings (say four per drawing), or about 400 drawings a year.

A guy at CBT, a cubby or two away, got inspired, and started his own tape ball.  Within a month it seemed his eclipsed mine which was maybe two years old at the time. On close inspection, though… a-HA!  He was merely slapping them on with little or no attempt to compress the ball, and keep it dense.  He was entraining air… Minus ten points, my friend.  Gotta stay old-school.  If it isn’t harder than a soft-ball, it’ll be DQ’d.  We architects don’t screw around.

I have a buddy who is searching the inter-tubes for new-old-stock charrette dots for me.  He’s convinced it must go on. Heck, he’s more concerned than I am.

If you remember zip-a-tone, Letraset, Leroy lettering, Keuffel-Esser templates, bar compasses, toilet templates (“hey, you see the one with toilets in elevation?”), begging your boss for a quadruple-aught jewel-tipped Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, debating the virtues of white-versus-yellow-versus-cream trace, getting high off spraymount, scrounging fome-cor….. well, then, this lament is for you.

Farewell, Charrette.  Thanks, indirectly at least, for my career.

Equestrian Center, Eye Level Sketches

Jamming on a crazy workload, so I’ll post something that is a little filler… some work I did back in March of 2009.  A few months back I posted an aerial for a rather large Equestrian Development in the Middle East. It was for a massive development of a veritable town, centered around the breeding, raising, training, and racing of Arabian horses.  The aerial was the principle need, but the client asked for three quick “loose” and sketchy views to begin a conversation about what the complex might feel like on the ground.

Here are the three sketches that were done as a part of that work.  These are much sketchier and lower resolution than the aerial, which was a virtual exercise in architectural scrimshaw (at 20 inches wide and 400 dpi).  These are supplements to that aerial, meant to flesh out the general feel of things, but without too much specificity, as the project was essentially still in schematics.

These too were modeled in Cinema 4D, lit, and rendered out to provide some basic color and atmosphere.  Everything else was paint. Well, ” digital paint” anyway.

View of the Parade Ground. 8x10 at 300 dpi

The shade structure hadn’t really been designed, and so I was asked to “make something up”.  I wanted to develop this image around blue/orange complements, with the warm and cool colors playing off each other.  A detail…

Detail of the Parade Ground Sketch... somewhat loose.

I hesitate to zoom in on these, because they aren’t intended to be detailed.  The idea was to view them at arm’s length, and that they’d be painterly, sketchy concept drawings, printed as illustrations on an 8-1/2 x 11 page.  The client wanted to spend the time on the aerial, and these were to be “extras” in the presentation.  I generally prefer to do all images in a suite to the same level of detail, honestly.  …but I won’t say I didn’t enjoy doing something much  looser than the aerial, which was about 40 hours of work.  Each of these was maybe 10 hours total, modeling, camera tests, color tests, and paint.

Sketch at the Hotel Courtyard 8x10 at 300dpi

Detail of the Hotel Courtyard

Presentation Ring, viewed from the Terrace 8x10 at 300dpi

Not much here when you zoom in, other than splotches and shadow/highlight.  Line work was kept simple, too, to keep from becoming overly fussy when dropped into the small book which these were intended to illustrate.  This detail is maybe 2×4.

After this deadline, I’ll post some work from the last quarter of 2009, which continued to find me very busy.  I was very lucky in 2009.   I hope the tide has turned, and that my colleagues on the architecture side of things are finding that their phone is ringing and they are busier than they have been in a while…

Guest Lecture at The New England School of Art and Design

About all I can show of the work from the past couple weeks...

This past week saw four really interesting formals (in my opinion anyway) developed for a project in Oslo.  The due date got shuffled around a bit, and so I indulged in a little extra time on these in order to develop the atmosphere and lighting in the images in a way that really tried to establish a sense of the location where the project is proposed.   I haven’t gotten the ok to go ahead and make them public, so it’ll have to wait, unfortunately.  Had a great time on them, and hope that it shows. In the not-too-distant future I’ll post them in their entirety.

On the second of December I spoke at Suffolk University’s New England School of Art and Design.  I was invited by Senofer Mendoza, who was teaching a workshop geared toward students who are heading into the final weeks of effort on their semester-long projects.  Senofer asked me to speak to them about what they can do to take their presentation images (perspectives, renderings, namely) to the proverbial “next level”.

I put together a longish presentation (hour or so, plus a half hour of Q&A) that was intended to do only a couple things.  You can’t really teach anyone to render in an hour’s class, but you can show them some important issues to consider, typical mistakes to avoid, and try to inspire them. Or perhaps confuse them…

Perhaps more accurate would be “The Perspectivist is Dead.  Ask around. You can get ‘photoreal’ renderings from China for $200.  And any architect can buy a copy of 3d Studio Max, slap some textures on the model, and hit ‘Render’ himself if he (or she) truly wanted.  Why would anyone hire an illustrator like our good friend Cyril Farey (above, ca. 1928) to toil on a ‘precious’ little illustration, with cutesy reflections on a wet street, working back in his studio in splendid isolation, while charging good money for the “privilege’?  Gone are the days, right? Buy a PC and start cranking out renderings yourself, and save some money.

I say, go ahead.

Sure. I’m being facetious. I’m really not trying to pull my own rug (or business) out from under me.

But let’s take a look at the example above. The Perspective is most certainly NOT dead. Nor the Perspectivist (thank God). It’s a 2D painting, done fairly quickly, by Craig Mullins.  He’s a guru in the motion picture industry now, but trained as an architect. He was hired to produce some images for the Orlando Performing Arts Center.

You can’t get this for 200 dollars from China.

This is from a suite of three or four images he did. Look closely, there’s not a lot of “there” there.  Not much detail.  What there IS is expression.  The intent and atmosphere are communicated, powerfully, in a way that a “photoreal” rendering could never achieve. Not without a lot of time and effort, anyway, and expense.  And certainly not produced in the same amount of time that Mullins spent on this. Let’s face it…. are you going to spend a few hundred million dollars on a high-profile project like this, and the turn to an outsourced discount one-of-a-thousand rendering shops to churn out your presentation? No. You hire someone you think can produce powerfully evocative images to represent your months’ long effort. The fact that Craig Mullins does this with nothing more than a hard round brush in photoshop is immaterial.  The production medium is irrelevant. The message is the important thing here.

My point is this: architects today are swimming in technology, downloading free copies of Sketch-Up, building massive “BIM” models, and populating their offices with teams of students trained(somewhat) in architecture school to run the most complex 3D software available. They are bombarded with unsolicited emails from off-shore shops churning out discount images.  And yet  when an image is required that needs to be expressive, informative, powerful, and more evocative than clinical, invariably the most successful architects are turning to a dedicated, professional, almost always independent, architectural illustrator.

Far from being ‘dead’, the perspective is more important now than it ever was.  A flood of middling, disconcerting, strangely pseudo-realistic renderings has only made the work of a professional illustrator stand out.  Rather than overtaking and burying the perspectivist, the tide of sub-par photoreal work has made architects and their clients hungrier for more evocative images, something more considered, beyond cold calculation and run-of-the-mill execution.People are more visually oriented perhaps now more than in any other era.  Videos, movies, television, the web…  We respond to the visual more powerfully than perhaps any other form of communication.

Projects today are balancing on a knife-edge, with go and no-go decisions riding on many factors.  Competition is fierce. Evocative, communicative, powerful images are necessary. The Perspective in an idealized sense isn’t “dead”, it is more vital today than it has ever been.

I didn’t spend that much time on the first two slides, but you get my point.

Moved into a little history.  What is “perspective”, and how did it develop, first in the artistic tradition, then eventually in architecture? Brunelleschi, Alberti, Francesca….

Francesca's paintings were perhaps the earliest images where hypothetical architectural designs were developed using Perspective Theory to accurately construct the 'built' forms. Still, though, it was more about 'Art' than it had anything to do with communicating an actual, proposed Architectural Design

My purpose for being invited, however, wasn’t to proselytize about hiring illustrators, or to give a history lesson.  Senofer suggested that the students, who were in a headlong charrette to finish their semester projects, were trying to take their own illustrations to a higher level. It seems that in architecture schools around the country (world, actually), it is becoming the standard fall-back position of many students to print out something from Sketch-Up and pin it to their presentation board.  Rather than computers allowing students to become more expressive, it seems the vast majority of work is defaulting to a path-of-least-resistance. Senofer and I decided it might serve the students better (in an hour’s time) if I could provide some direct comments regarding composition, relate some common errors to avoid, and give some practical tips about building a better fundamental image.

A sound composition and considered approach will pay greater benefits up front, to a student illustrating his or her own work, than any artistic ‘talent’ will.  Later, artistic expression will pay off, but a more immediate improvement can be found by stepping back, slowing down, and considering the basics for a few moments. This was what we decided to spend an hour on.  Fundamentals.

Here are some of the slides…

Consider the placement of your "Center of Interest". What's the part of the image that's most critical part of the message? Try Placing it close to or on any of the "Third Points" of the Composition. Mentally divide the Image into thirds. In general. locating the center of interest near one of these points can produce a fundamentally more composed, balanced, even dynamic image.

Here’s a poorly located center of interest. Dead center, and static.  The horizon cutting the scene in half top to bottom.

Zzzzzzz..... no good.

Same image, simply shifted to a third-point.

...better

Center of gravity is often a consideration.  When a number of elements share the relative same level of ‘importance’ visually, it is often best to locate their center of gravity somewhere close to the center of the  image.

Here are three elements crammed low left on the page.

Awkwardly placed center of gravity of three equal elements.

Here, the image is more restful and literally balanced.

Immediately better, simply by considering the placement of the group as a whole.

All of this is fairly basic, and can be found in art, film, television…. Nothing new here.  But I remember the first time some of these concepts were related to me as a student. It produced an immediate improvement in my presentation work, and has since then provided a great basic “check” for me when producing images professionally.   Sure, these are rules which can (and often are) broken.  But they retain an elemental truth, and speak to the very clearly understood way in which the human eye consciously and subconsciously breaks down or digests, and understands, an image.

There was more, but I’ll jump ahead.  The students were working toward their Interior Design degrees, and so I tailored much of the talk specifically to architectural images (interior and exterior).

Avoid the Goalpost Effect

Whether it is trees on an exterior image, or columns in an interior image, don’t set your viewpoint equally between them, with each side of the frame established by the same element.  Feels a bit like wearing horse-blinders.  …or like you are staring between the goal posts.

Break it up, change scale, or move the camera. Create some differences. In this case, I’ve scaled the elements differently.

Break up the goal posts...

Don’t allow the geometry of the composition (which is established most of the time by the subject) to lead the eye straight out of the image.

The angularity and "vanishing" of the subject can sometimes be so strong as to lead the viewer out of the frame, which is a problem.

Use other elements to keep the eye moving within the image.

A foreground element introduced at right steers the eye back into the frame.

Fast forward a bit… some slides spoke directly to handling “entourage”, those other elements in the scene which are supplemental but necessary.  Trees, cars, people, furniture… all of these elements are secondary to the message, but without them the page feels empty.  If treated with too little thought, they can sabotage an image and disrupt the message. In some cases, they can nearly defeat the effort. Entourage is important, and yet it cannot be made TOO important, lest it overtake the composition.

Some entourage basics.

Hang them from their eyes....

When people of similar height are introduced into a rendering taken at eye-level, they will all be properly placed when their eyes coincide with the horizon line.  The horizon is, after all, the “Eye Level” of the viewer.  And if the other people in the scene are close to the same height, their eyes will also fall on the horizon.  Smaller figures will read as though they are farther away, and larger figures will read closer.

Only one of these people really "works" well enough to be included in an image.

Don’t use distracting elements as entourage.  The woman dead-center is so graphic and obvious, that she would draw the eye away from the center of interest. Perhaps the single worst piece of advice I ever heard regarding entourage was when someone said “I get all my entourage from photographs of fashion shows.  Runway models are great.”  Using runway models is a sure way to look like an amateur, and to defeat the purpose of the image in the first place.

Just as you don’t want to grab the eye from your center of interest, you also don’t want to introduce elements which are uninteresting and dour. The woman at left is a little too dumpy… all neutral grey/brown/ecru and utterly uninteresting.  Also not good. You can’t steer the eye to your center of interest by making your entourage boring.

The woman at right is the best of the three.  Even so, she’s a little too obviously “photo stock”.  No one smiles like that walking by themselves, unless they are on psychotics.  But she’s better than the others.  If I were going to drop her into an image, I’d pair her with a friend (give her a reason to smile), tone down the hues, and break down her image enough to kill some detail.

Distracting people are bad, but the rule holds true for other elements too.

No one cares which cars you think are "cool"....

Often, an in-house rendering, or one done “on the cheap”, will exhibit a parking lot filled with Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and (what seemed to be a trend for a while, and my personal pet peeve) the bright yellow 300zx.  It’s not enough to be able to run the software.  A person needs to step outside the image and look at it from the perspective of the viewer.  Fancy sports cars do NOT imbue an image with a sense of “upscale lifestyle”, they draw the attention of the viewer, and send the message that “we had our intern produce the image”.

Don't cut and paste the same element over and over again within an image...

I have seen the “cloned tree” phenomenon so many times, I’m ready to scream.  Bad enough when it is done within a sketchy conceptual image.  But i have seen the same tree creep into even some of the finest photoreal illustrations.  It’s as if people forget that we recognize pattern.  Trust me, use the same tree twice in an image, and it will stick out.  Flip it? Still obvious.  If you must, try to at least break it down, clone-stamp bits and erase others to fabricate similar trees from the original “clone”.  Go ahead and create ten trees from the same tree, but for the love of god don’t think we won’t notice a street of the same tree used over and over again. It’s all that we WILL notice.

Don’t think your design (your interior, your building, whatever) is so precious that you cannot obscure parts of it with entourage.  Problem number one in my line of work is trying to convince the occasional architect who refuses to permit ANYTHING to touch his building.  Look at this sketch.  All the trees are held safely away.  “Thou shalt not touch the building”. The building here floats in a safe cocoon.  It’s boring, and isn’t at all integrated into the image. Notice how the trees awkwardly stay away from the building.

Don't be afraid to overlap the center of interest with entourage elements. This false reverence for the subject is just so sad and obvious...

Instead, take a little joy in breaking the too-perfect lines, integrate the elements into the scene, and it will integrate the subject as well.

Much better, and far less obsequious....

The slides here represent a small portion of the practical aspects that we discussed.  These are perhaps the concepts with the greatest impact.

The remainder of the talk was spent introducing the students to sources of inspiration, showing examples of other student work, and included a brief survey of the work of the leaders in architectural illustration.

You can never really know what effect a talk like this will have on the students, and so can only hope to spur their interest and give them some practical help and advice regarding their own work.  I feel like I learn something every day in my profession, and so I look at this as passing along the same sorts of things that were passed on to me.

Modern Theatre, Boston; Lobby Interior

Got a call from the architect a couple months ago, Adrian LeBuffe of CBT Architects in Boston, that as a follow-up to the previous three images done for this project, they’d like to go ahead and have a rendering done of the Lobby. This one was going to be a little more dialed back than the others, less theatrical and dark, but it still needed to integrate with the suite of images. The idea was to go much lighter here, yet incorporate the looseness and stylized nature of the others.

The Modern Theatre, Lobby Interior, Washington Street Boston

The space has a great winding staircase which travels up and around the volume, crossing in front of the large original entry, which is a large glazed opening that looks out onto Washington Street (behind the viewer in this image).

The walls were intended to hold a number of pieces of art work, potentially a rotating exhibition of student work.  There wasn’t much else to animate the space, and as is often typical, there was a desire to get back and see as much of the volume as is possible.  Often, this is a nightmare, with extra wide angles distorting everything, and a difficult time wrangling the eye toward a center of interest.

The fact that the stair wound itself all around the space was a godsend in this regard, because it allowed the edges of the image to develop a sort of circular composition, the eye crawling up the stairs from the bottom landing, across toward the viewer’s station point, and upward at left to the balcony beyond, returning to the right and down. In order to anchor the composition, I placed a colorful piece of artwork and the figure of a woman together on the low landing, and balanced those with the largest piece of art on the adjacent left wall. The thinking was that these three elements would work together to form a center of gravity at one of the third points.  They act not so much as an obvious center of interest in the classical sense, but more of an achor, around which the eye can move.

The Large Piece of Artwork (a detail from the Building's Exterior) Works with the Colored Artwork (a detail from the Paramount) and the Figure of the Woman to form the Center of Gravity for the entire Composition.

The neutral color palette was a head-scratcher, too, frankly.  Not for design’s sake, of course.  A neutral palette for the walls supports the artwork, and is entirely reasonable.  I was thinking purely with regard to the level of energy of the prior three images, where the lighting and color were more vibrant simply because we were dealing with exterior night scenes, and an energetic theater interior.

The fixtures lighting the artwork might have provided an excuse to get playful with lighting, but artwork is generally lit evenly and unobtrusively, not theatrically.  So, aside from some nice shadows from the frames, and highlights (I decided to make the frames nickel-silver in color), I wasn’t going to be able to get too exuberant with the lighting.  I didn’t want to light the space in a way that was counter to communicating the design intent, which is the primary consideration of the image after all.

All the other scenes for this series are taken at night, and despite the fact that our viewer’s back is to the large entry window, I still felt it could be an evening scene. This allowed me to introduce other colors not a part of the finish scheme per se by simply treating the scene outside as a wonderfully, colorfully lit source of colored light and colored specular reflections.  It is a street of great theaters, and nightlife is returning, so the hues here come from lights outside the building, at the sidewalk and from retail buildings adjacent and across the street.  These colors creep into the darker corners of the space as colored fill light (turning boring grey shadows into shadows of color), but they are most noticeable at the metal rail, which reflects the lights and ambient color from the exterior.

The Foreground Rail reflects the Lights and Colors from the Street Outside

A door opening beyond, tucked under the uppermost landing, is the entrance to the new theater space itself.  In a vitrine on its far wall is a section from the original theater’s frieze.  The rest of the existing 19th century house was beyond salvage, but a portion of its cherubic frieze, about four feet tall and nine feet long, will provide some color and visual interest to the theater vestibule.

Detail showing the Entrance to the Theater at Ground Level, with some artwork on the volume at right, which houses the building's elevator.

In order to break up the long unrelenting (compositionally, anyway) handrail, I introduced the figure of a woman at the rail, hit from above by a downlight.  She not only breaks the rail, but somewhat obviously redirects us back into the image and reinforces the circular composition. The rail behind her continues up and to the right, and the eye renters the loop.

The Figure at Left serves to break the long line of the Winding Rail

The rewarding thing to me about this series is that the Architect and his Client (Suffolk University) recognized that the very nature of the Theater as a project type, and the fact that the project would provide some much-needed (and long missing) activity and visual interest to this portion of Washington Street, meant that we could be a little more experimental.  The exterior images set a tone and a stylistic approach, and the challenge then became to maintain that theme throughout the series, as the two interior pieces were introduced at later dates.