the lost designs of a paper architect

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I’m playing the role of an imaginary late-19th Century paper architect. A designer who never built a single building but somehow presaged The Bauhaus, Arts & Crafts, Brutalism, Modernism.

One day, I grabbed a a 3”x3”x3” puzzle cube and recreated some iconic buildings from memory. The structures were crafted using just 7 unique 3-D pieces. I used both a red-plastic set and a stained-wood set to construct the "architecture.” I moved on to crafting my own buildings. 

These structures are  lit with strobe and photographed with a 4x5 studio film camera. The darkroom prints are made with damaged/out-of-date bromide paper, developed in 100-degree  Lith chemistry. This paper-developer combo produces something very akin to a decayed, browned, faded charcoal/graphite drawing—locating the prints squarely in the hand-drawn style of late 19th century architectural illustration. Like finding a water-damaged folio. 

The patient and accurate camerawork butting up against the abject chaos and unrepeatability of the Lith printing process is a primary joy in this work. Once I have an original print that hits all the buttons, I make a scan and move on to larger archival inkjet prints.