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Design

Installation Maps Out History With 8,000 Colored Pencils

Presenting an enormous, technicolor representation of the U of Minnesota Architecture School.

Imagine history made tangible, a 3-dimensional timeline that you can touch, walk around, and explore. That’s what Adam Marcus and Daniel Raznick of Variable Projects wanted to create when they came up with the idea of Centennial Chromagraph, an enormous sculptural representation of the history of the University of Minnesota School of Architecture.

Creating the body of the scupture are 100 tall wooden plywood “ribs”. The ribs had holes drilled into them by robotic arms before they were cut into curving, dramatic shapes and inscribed with names and dates. The enormous structure is connected by colorful University of Minnesota School of Architecture pencils--8,080 of them in all.

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"The first phase of the project was a data mining and data analysis exercise, in which we explored a series of mapping studies based on the School’s alumni database, " Adam Marcus explained to us. "The Rhinoceros 3d modeling software package and its Grasshopper parametric modeling plugin were used to visualize the data in three dimensions, in relation to class sizes, degree types, and geographic locations of the School's graduates through time."

"…the installation’s curved form is derived from broad ranges from the school’s history: the tenures of its leadership, the buildings it has occupied, and the colleges it has belonged to," continued Marcus.

The 100 ribs take us back through the past 100 years of the school’s life, from its start to right now. As mentioned above, each of the waves represents a different moment in the history of the school, the colors of the pencils representing changes the school made through time.

For instance, in 1954, Ralph Rapson was named head, and the sculpture curves outwards from the year he was appointed to the year his leadership ended (see below).

The color of the pencils throughout the sculpture also represent changes in the degree programs of the school. The red pencils, for example, represent the Bachelor of Architecture degree. The red pencils can be seen in large numbers from the date the degree was created, 1930, to the date it was replaced with other degrees, in the 1990’s.

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The project, created in collaboration with students at the school, was produced in a class where pupils explored history through shapes and forms--creating something dramatically different from the kinds of unappealing, simplistic timelines you might have been assigned in grade school. The school’s history--a topic which, let’s face it, can often seem dry and uninteresting--is transformed, quite literally, into a work of art.

Imagine telling the story of the civil rights movement or women in the workplace with a sculpture like this. Imagine being able to explore different peoples’ lives through the curves, different movements through the pencils. This new form of sculpture, this new form of story-telling, promises us an awe-inspiring, in-depth, and unique way to teach history.

For more on Centennial Chromagraph check out the video short below:

Centennial Chromagraph: Fabrication, Finishing, Assembly from Adam Marcus.