Thalia
Vaughan
To Create a Ruin
The decay and ruination of buildings has always been fascinating, this project explored how materials and buildings weathered. It was discovered that Poole's high street is gradually decaying but constantly being maintained, generally it would seem that the public does not like to see decay, if a building is abandoned and falls to ruin it is soon torn down and out of site. The Beech Hurst; a well known grade II listed building in Poole, was recreated as a 1:50 card model, from here it was explored as an abandoned building. The effect that light had on the shell of the Beech Hurst became a focus, the light animated the building despite it being an empty shell.
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An additional part of this project was an experiment on a variety of materials to see how they would decay, a series of identical models were made using a variety of materials and each one experienced a different kind of ruination, one was either buried, left outside over a couple of months or set fire to. The materials used were plastic, copper, steel, wood, and plaster which seemed to be the most durable.
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Alongside the making for this project buildings like the Villa Savoye in ruins was studied, alongside artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Lori Nix. Gordon Matta-Clark experimented with abandoned buildings by cutting into them, blurring the parameters of the inside and outside, unfortunately his art was not fully recognised and was seen as vandalism. Lori Nix is a photographer who has created small models of ruined places in cities then photographed them as if real scenes from an abandoned city.
Copper is well known to be an easily decaying material, copper leaf was stuck to card and sprayed with vinegar water for 8 days. The effect of the water was incredible, each time the copper changed in some way until it started to erode away completely.