Room in New York- Edward Hopper

When I first received this assignment I knew straight away which painting from Edward Hopper I would select, as this has always interested me and I have it to be a multi-dimensional image which has several layers and ideas that i could work with.

The selected work is: Room In New York- By Edward Hopper 1937.

Also the era in which it was painted helped to paint a clearer picture of the storey Hopper was trying to portray.
Expressive planarity dominates The Room in New York oil painting. He uses the figures as social puppets to portray sentiment for the scene. The woman seems to give a sense of awareness to the situation rather than the man who appears to be self consumed and preoccupied by the world around him. Although life has subsided in the figures the walls and the scene in the background has a vibrant sense, with lively colours. My eyes were automatically drawn to the pale female figure and the daydream she seems to be caught in. It may help her escape.


My original Narrative Sentence:
Voyeurs peer at a vibrant cage containing a lifeless couple, although they are contained together they are worlds apart. She is a dreamer trapped in a dungeon of his age-old obligations.

I edited my original sentence so that it told a clearer storey but through a more poetic sense.


NARRATIVE:

A woman placed on a pedestal, by the voyeuristic eyes from the world beyond her window, her obligations are her cage, her cage is her theatre. Faceless to her voyeurs, her truth, her comfort lies beneath the facade of this stage which 'they' call "her life".

Final Product

My Drawings

As this was my first time and probably my only opportunity to do some drawings without using a computer to help me I decided to hand draw all my parti and poche drawings. I must admit it was quite a challenge but I did learn a lot and I am glad I gave it shot. As you can there is very little shading in my poche drawings this is because the structure itself was designed to have internal structural supports by using columns and partition walls allowing the external frame to be light and non loading bearing which is how it allows so many windows. the building was intended to feel very light and open with a lot of natural lighting which meant if I had excessively shaded the building it would not have been true to the structure.

Creating the Model

We split the model making process in 3 Parts for each group member.
Tri- Had the entire left side of the building which may sound unfair although that part of the structure was very simple and had less rooms and detail then the right ride of the building. Also we gave him a hand when with the finer details.
Barney & I: had the right side of the building we worked as team creating floor by floor. As it was the first model I had ever created I didn't do any of the curved walls, my much experienced team members worked on that. Although by the end of the model making process I felt very confident in my abilities and I did improve. We worked on the model on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and even sacrificed a Sunday to work on it, although it was still a fun project to work on.

Understanding the space

In order for me to understand the structure well enough to model it, I formed up some images of the different spaces of the building and how the rooms are intended to be used. I also traced the plans using Archi-Cad to create floor plans for which my group could use in order to have a base for our model.

Background Information

Villa Savoye is located in Poissy France, Designed by Le Corbusier it is an early and classic example of the "International Style", which hovers above a grass plane on thin concrete pilotti, with strip windows, and a flat roof with a deck area, ramp, and a few contained touches of curvaceous walls.

"Unlike the confined urban locations of most of Le Corbusier's earlier houses, the openness of the Poissy site permitted a freestanding building and the full realization of his five-point program. Essentially the house comprises two contrasting, sharply defined, yet interpenetrating external aspects. The dominant element is the square single-storied box, a pure, sleek, geometric envelope lifted buoyantly above slender pilotis, its taut skin slit for narrow ribbon windows that run unbroken from corner to corner (but not over them, thus preserving the integrity of the sides of the square)."
—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p530.

Information gather from websites:

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Villa_Savoye.html

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/france/poissy/savoye/corbuindex.html