Eternal Figures of the Boundless Ground

Eternal Figures of the Boundless Ground is an ongoing body of work that carries my passion. It serves as a roadmap for collecting and cataloging both themes and peculiarities of the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern Roman city plan, with the objective of revealing dormant rhythms of the built and buried city. Armed with these artifacts, I am pursuing an understanding of what we may learn from these essential spatial relationships to propose how they may support future cities (as planning models) while also providing enrichment in everyday life (as decor). This project, by its very nature, expands and enhances my work as a  surface designer, through which I attempt to understand, articulate and translate expansive urban patterns to the materials of domestic life. 

I am currently engaged in a host of creative exercises that include drawings, collages, and digital figure-ground studies. I am using the repetition, variation and aggregation of selected motifs to generate a volume of new occupiable patterns and a proposed built intervention in my studio space.

I work at three scales in my groundwork research: the overview of city, the composition of the building, and the materiality of the surface. I search for common themes — without hierarchy — by crafting a maximalist pattern-inventory composed of stone paving, brick coursing, fenestration rhythms, column spacing, water infrastructure, pine planting, etc. I then consider this inventory together with the artistic patterns of ornament, textiles, and typography, along with the macro patterns of building configurations, zoning, and public space.

For me, this expedition, by its very nature, reflects back on how life in the Americas, especially Chicago, has shaped my present design vocabulary, specifically addressing the colonial idealism of the overlay grid, which was originally exported by the Roman Republic. What does Rome’s example provide for us in exchange for the navigability and order of the gridded city? How might I uncover its appealing complexities that result from immovable monuments/terrain and the exchange of goods/ideas, as well as spontaneous disruptions that result from acts of security, vanity, prosperity and generosity in pursuit of my own discovery and proficiency in eternal pattern-languages?