| For two weeks after I returned home from visiting your school I have had really good weather for working outdoors. I decided to build the mock-up immediately, even though I won't need it until next spring. I used the measurements I took to build an exact replica of the space for artwork. I'm calling it a mock-up. With a scale mock-up I can build the artwork here and ship it to your school next summer it will fit the space in your school.
I have designed the artwork so I can build most of it indoors in my studio. When I'm ready to install a piece on the mock-up, I will use a material called Tyvek as pattern material. It will be stapled to the plywood first, the artwork installed, and then the fastening locations marked on the Tyvek. This will provide me with an accurate pattern of all the necessary holes for installing the artwork at your school. Tyvek won't stretch and is waterproof so it is a perfect durable pattern material.
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| There is just enough room for a 24 x 24 foot square between the pine trees. I established a cinder block reference point and measured the distances between all blocks to make four corners the actual space I would be working in. |
All parts of the mock-up are related to one point, and that is the upright closest to you in this picture. The math lesson below shows how I made sure the three corners were absolutely square. |
Once I was sure the three corners were true and square, I built the area for artwork that is above the ramp and steps to the library.
The lowest point is the bottom edge of the lower ramp so that is the next thing to establish. This is inside the square, but it is referenced to the outer edge which is why I had to do the outside first.
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You have to study this to see what I did. I reasoned that there was no point in building anything that didn't get artwork. The top of the end of the lower ramp is the lowest point for art work. All art goes above this point so I made that the bottom of the mock-up which is at ground level.
I have drawn lines between the mock-up and the actual space so you can see how they compare. I hope this makes sense to you. If not, please email me and I'll explain it in another way.
Only the plywood areas get artwork.
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Math Lesson
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Your math teacher asked me to point out some of the math I needed to do this project. Well, laying out the mock-up certainly required math; geometry as well. The outline had to be square, that is all sides at right angles to one another. Your teacher can explain right angle. One way to do this is to find the length of the line between the two sides, called the hypotenuse. A clever guy from Greece, named Pythagoras, figured out how to do this. He came up with a mathematical formula: a2 + b2 = c2 where a and b are sides and c is the hypotenuse. Your teacher can explain that too. This worked very well, and I'm confident the corners are square and accurate. |
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There are two primary artwork areas. One is above the ramp (the south wall) the other is the area above the library.
After the ramp area was established I could line up and install the plywood for the library artwork.
This turns out to be 12' from the bottom edge of the ramp artwork.
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There is only 20" space for the two outer walls. Above the "Exit" sign in the case of the south wall.
The white frame in the picture is a frame for an art festival cover. The top center is where the sun will be located. I'll use the frame to set up the sun and sun rays. The sun rays will extend from the sun to each wall and is the primary reason for making this mock-up in the first place.
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| The finished mock-up is about 90% accurate and will be trued up in the spring when I'm ready to install pieces of the artwork. In a situation like this I try to design around extreme accuracy because it is so difficult to achieve. Instead I design for wide tolerances. The sun rays are the most critical in measurement, but I'm going to make them with a 2" tolerance. In other words, the connection point of the sun ray can be as much as 2" off and still fit. The other pieces that need to be accurate are the cloud/light/sky forms that span the lower ramp. I have designed a 2" tolerance system for this as well which you will be able to see on that page when it is ready. |
