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While attending a lecture series on Chilean architecture at The Americas Society in New York, Alastair Noble, assistant professor of art, was fascinated by a talk and photography exhibition of the Open City (La Ciudad Abierta) in Chile. He discovered that he and the architectural community that founded the city share many of the same influences. Noble is the first artist invited to stay on site at Open City.
Established by the faculty of the School of Architecture and Design, Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Open City is a 300-hectare property on the Pacific coast. It is a community of architects, designers, and poets who design experimental architectural structures called Hospederías (houses of hospitality to share meals and ideas). Not a city in the traditional sense, it is maintained and supported by the members of the community, most of whom live on the property and teach at the university.
At Open City, Noble studied and documented several of the site’s structures. He also gave community and university lectures on his sculptural work’s relationship to poetry and observed the university’s teaching pedagogy and classroom approaches.
Inspired by his experience, Noble proposed a sculpture for the high sand dunes on the city’s property. With the help of design and architecture students and another faculty member, Noble built a full-size bamboo prototype.
The sculpture is in the form of the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross. The symbol is the focal point of the long poem Amereida, a celebration of the South American continent written in 1967 by the Argentinean poet Godofrodo Iommi, one of Open City’s founders. Poetry plays a vital role in the community; all architectural designs and structures proceed only after a poetic act has taken place on the area where the proposed structures are to be built.
“[My sculpture] is a sort of pavilion – a four-sided diamond shape raised 12 feet in the air supported by four legs with the top defining a cross covered in a double layer of metal screen mesh,” explains Noble. “The light passing through the raised cross form and layered screen mesh will cast a shadow onto the sand below. The cross shadow will appear within a watery pattern on the sand, an effect called a moiré pattern. Each supporting leg will act as the directional line for a series of posts that will continue on over the dunes like a running fence. Each of the cardinal points of the star will stretch out over the land way beyond the main pavilion form.”
He also produced a limited edition relief print based on the Southern Cross image in the university’s graphics workshop. He will continue work on a series of prints related to his sculpture during a three-week residency at Belgium’s Frans Masereel Centre printmaking workshop this spring.
Noble looks forward to incorporating his experiences from Open City into an enhanced learning experience for his Lafayette students. He hopes to organize student trips to Chile and may establish a student exchange program.
“Poetry and drawing play a very important role in the aesthetic development vision of the design and architecture in the students at the institute I visited in Chile,” he says. “These two areas have always played an important role in my syllabus; however, I can envision placing even greater emphasis on these areas in the future. Having undertaken an extensive study of the architectural structures of the Open City, this research will be invaluable to the students who will be taking the new architectural studies minor at Lafayette.”
Noble is planning a photography exhibition of Open City next semester with the help of Michiko Okaya, director of the art gallery, Williams Center for the Arts.