Parker Bunce: Unspoken, with Exuberance
SHOW: Feb 10-20, Greene 201 LECTURE: Wed Feb 19, 6pm, Greene Gallery
Parker Bunce: “Unspoken, with Exuberance”
[Brown’s Presentation]
Thesis student, Parker Bunce presents UNSPOKEN, WITH EXUBERANCE as a study of “Understanding the Finnish sense of place” not as site or landscape but “to understand culturally something greater, something intrinsic, something absorbed, something experienced, something unspoken.” This presentation covers his travels to Finland as part of the Brown’s Travel Fellowship that he was awarded in 2012.
Certain landscapes have a particular power to impress upon their inhabitants a sublime idea. This effect goes far beyond the tangible considerations of climate, insolation, and local materials that tend to drive the formation of a local colloquial architecture: it is a greater sense of what it is to live in a place that refuses to be ignored.
Understanding the Finnish sense of place is not to understand site or landscape in an academic sense; it is to understand culturally something greater, something intrinsic, something absorbed, something experienced, something unspoken.
While Finland may lack the dramatic vistas and rugged terrain typically associated with bold landscape, the country still identifies with its place. Finnish life operates in comparison to a constant backdrop of endless conifers. The forest is the starting point: it is the source of legend and memory. Seasonal change brings constant light in summer, and endless darkness in winter, lending the culture a contradictory nature. Finns are welcoming, and warm, while maintaining a preference for silence in conversation. They are prosperous and happy, yet hold one of the world’s highest suicide rates per capita.
Houses in the country are nearly always painted red, lending a bright joy in the summer sun, while silently offering a lonely scream in the dark of winter.
In examining Finland, its landscape, and its culture, Bunce strives to understand something that is not explained or spoken. Something that is not defined, nor fully understood.
Three models are presented to convey what is unspoken in Finland. The Niemila Tenant farm shows us a traditional relationship between culture and landscape. A collection of small, disjointed structures form a complex arrangement revolving around drawing a living from the land. Alvar Aalto’s Experimental House shows us the sense of placid acceptance of life in the north woods. His composition of small, diminutive structures in reference to their landscape forms a more complex notion of where one lives. A collage model draws on the works of many different designers and places, creating a collage of Finnish architecture: this composition pieces together the different dimension of the culture in site.
PARKER BARNES BUNCE
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