Portrait Of a Marble Quarry | 2022
Digital collage of manually embossed paper and watercolor.
Graduate Thesis: University of Toronto.
Supervisor: John Shnier
Portrait Of a Marble Quarry is a large format drawing that investigates ways to represent texture. It is a commentary on the challenges faced in the architectural practice of engaging with natural materials evocatively and the bias inherent in representation tools often prioritizing form over materiality. This contributes to the lack of design intentionality when it comes to material use and the disconnection from material sourcing, and extraction practices.
The drawing uses experimental and innovative drawing techniques to portray the power and magic of quarry spaces in that rare moment in the lifespan of stone — suspended between being raw and refined, between being a landscape, a building material, and an architectural space.
Representation experiments included graphite stone rubbing, pressing natural textures into clay, and embossing stone on watercolor paper, among others. The final drawing was produced using the embossed paper method.
This work is part of a year-long graduate research that uses drawings as a method to investigate and iterate architectural ideas using allegorical narratives that are rooted in current and historical material research.
The work is informed by visits to numerous quarries in western Sicily and the Alentejo marble region in Portugal, in their various states, from abandoned, to repurposed and active extraction sites. These geographies offer unique opportunities to intimately engage with these landscapes.
These visits triggered a curiosity to study the architectural qualities of quarry spaces and the possibilities of bringing some of these characteristics —scale, tactility, materiality, and the inherent monumentality found in monolithic structures— into architecture.
These visits triggered a curiosity to study the architectural qualities of quarry spaces and the possibilities of bringing some of these characteristics —scale, tactility, materiality, and the inherent monumentality found in monolithic structures— into architecture.
