Design Process
The project started with an idea that combines a physical model and a digital map that collectively help the readers navigate the chapter of “Circe” or “the Wandering Rocks,” and was narrowed down to a focus on a physical model of the “Circe” nighttown that finds its index and annotations on a Web page.
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The final product is a result of both grander ideas and practical constraints such as time, labor and financial costs; yet it is worth documenting the various forms that the team envisioned the physical model to take. In the brainstorming process, we imagined the underground to take on the more compartmentalized shapes of “staircase,” “drawers,” “bookshelves” as well as more organic forms such as “an ant farm.” We eventually settled with the four caves – as explained in the “Landscape Walk-Through” – as a metaphor for the conscious and the subconscious.
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In terms of the actual architecture of the model, we redrew the map of the red-light district (done by the Joycean scholars Hart and Gunn) using AutoCAD, and we took the section of the map where the most of the story in “Circe” took place to build the above-ground portion of our physical object. To build the above-ground portion, we stacked laser-cut the 1/8" medium-density fiberboard. We chose to laser cut fiberboard because we considered the above-ground portion to be the actual landscape of the red-light district, which contains the substantial physical locations and therefore is represented with material that gives us a sharp and defined edge. For the underground portion of the physical object, we stacked hand-cut 1/2" black foam board. We chose to cut foam board by hand because the underground part represents the unconsciousness and hallucinations of Bloom and Stephen. Hand-cut Foam board lacks the shape and texture of concrete objects and serves the purpose of creating a dream-like feeling. Since the underground part is meant to be dug straight from the land, the rough texture and the color of the foam boards illustrates the materiality.
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