Regina Pricillia
Brick Refuge
From the fourth-year undergraduate option studio (im)perfection, Fall 2020
Faculty: Dan Wheeler
About the studio:
This studio built on students’ previous experiences—designing Chicago Frame towers, monasteries, and casinos—with a heightened interest in discipline and control. To do so, the studio took on the taboo subject of perfection, and its grounded alter ego, imperfection. Our vehicle of testing was a triptych of modestly scaled working studios, each bound by a 50 by 50 by 16 foot envelope, forming a wall running parallel to the sublime ore walls at US Steel’s South Works.
About the project:
The project explores the creation of an artist’s sanctuary with the modest brick. Honesty of material is maintained both visually and structurally; the walls are thick and its mass occupiable, the ceilings vaulted to obey the nature of brick. The brick is the wall, the bench, and the table, but as the brick folds into the sanctuary it is met with a white plaster wall, hovering over the brick, providing a workable surface as well as contrast between the inner and outer sanctums.