They’ve placed the 2×6’s around the perimeter to cast the final 3″ of height of the wall. The inspector’s given us the go-ahead to pour so they’ll have filled the cores and “topped out” the concrete by the end of the day. Good timing as it may rain again Monday. Next steps will be waterproofing and backfilling to the perimeter walls.
When I was a sophomore in architecture school at RISD we were reading October
a lot and the idea of anamorphic projection was central to an essay I can’t seem to track down. Suffice it say we were into simulations, mythologies, rethinking representation, and the gaze.1
The highlight of this essay was Holbein’s painting from 1533 The Ambassadors:
the smear at the bottom is a skull:
“Corrected” Skull (detail)
and you could take this any number of ways i suppose. There are general views and specific, and one specific angle produces this effect. The distortion is what interested me. At the time, in the mid to late eighties, rural Rhode Island seemed to be full of blank billboards and dead drive-ins. Starting out making buildings I saw these empty screens as big planes, and the way they were inevitably tilted to the road, at some bias or other, gave them a shape- the rectangle distorted in perspective. Maybe it was from building models in bristol board, where that white surface first cut looked like one of these:
Abandoned Rural Drive-Ins
We were also learning how to draw in perspective. Machado Silvetti where I worked for an internship was a sort of temple to drawing.
Ellsworth Kelly Lake 2 photo courtesy the artist (via fondation beyeler)
I think at the same time I was seeing Ellsworth Kelly doing the same thing but opposite: using the distortion to create an illusion of space.
So this simple idea of the way a shape changes depending on how you look at it seemed to be enough to me. Just housing the function of a building, then wrapping it in some effect that would acknowledge being looked at. Because no matter what, you can expect it to be looked at.
I guess all of that explains why I was excited to realize that making the facade parallel to the 21 degree angle of Frontenac Avenue2, cutting at a bias to the property lines, would not only add 103 square feet and allow everything to fit, but it would end up end up creating this sort of distorted floor plate.
Basement showing additional area with parallel to street facade
Here are three views of this in perspective- I’ve highlighted in white where the floor framing will go:
View SW towards self realization fellowship
View South
You start to see as it turns the shape becoming less pointy, more squared off- the angle at the right closes down and the angle at the left opens up.
View Southeast
Here the shape appears the most “square”.
footnotes
1Perhaps you are what you read as much as you are what you eat.
2In writing this I realized my father’s parent’s place, which I’ve been told about but don’t truly remember, had an acute angle on its corner in the same sort of happenstance of street layout that’s more common in the east (here Nantucket) than it is in the west. The angle between Center and Hussey Streets is one degree off of our acuteness at twenty. I’m amused at these fragments of formal quotations I recognize in the everyday buildings near my office that I clearly have sublimated to some angle or gesture in a project.
buildingahillsidehome 
