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Modern Cubist Sculpture

© Joe Jeskiewicz

So many of us don’t often place Architecture in the category of sculpture. To many it is a construction of small pieces but looking at modern architecture and progressive architecture I see patterns that lend themselves more to a building carved directly from the stone than the stone placed in the shape of a building.

One of my heroes in the art world is Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps to architecture students this is the old fall back of the inexperienced or unschooled. A similar comparison may be drawn in that many people’s favorite artists are those names we are all too familiar with and this simple familiarity leads to favoritism. Artists such as Giger and Dali in some circles, Kincaid and Monet in others, fit this description.

Nonetheless, Wright is a big influence on how I think of architecture for the time being and I am especially inspired by his non-architectural statements in sculpture and glass. Of course he is not the only artist who makes an impression on me in the field of sculpture. Rodin, Lissitzky, and Boccioni also draw my eye and heart to think of things greater than this mortal world.

Drawing upon these influences and my own tendencies I declare here the first exercise of the new year to be in thinking about sculpture, either real or virtual, as in my case. The virtual world may not offer those tactile qualities that established sculpture as the first real interactive 3D environment. But it can be an exploration in itself or a jumping point for translating the mathematics of a virtual sculpture into the 3D world. Without doing my homework I will be so bold as to say there are machines that can carve and create the 3D objects on your computer into actual physical replicas either from wood, metal, or plastic.

For this exercise I imagined first an inverted pyramid of various boxes stacked on top of one another, but the dynamics always seemed to be unbalanced so I turned it over and draw all the box down into 2 4-point stars, one on the other. Then rising from this new platform I could see a wrought iron glass construction standing tall. There I decided upon drawing in the Wright influence. However relying only on memory I came up with complicated unbalanced designs so I retreated to studying briefly a site that offered replications of the glasswork of FLW.

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