the gus & fay jones House

The Fay and Gus Jones House

Documentation & Representation:

• The University of Arkansas was gifted the private home of Fay Jones; one of his earliest projects.  The responsibility for the historical preservation of the house fell to the university, and the architecture faculty.  A 5th year design studio was created to generate an inventory, document the existing conditions, historical conditions, and both the contemporary and historical contexts, for the project.
• The studio was centered around a museum exhibit for Chrystal Bridges (in Bentonville, AR) that would synthesize emerging technologies, current conventions, and past analog mediums to communicate the significance of this house to the public and to explore new modes and methodologies to evaluate their efficacy as archival artifacts for future study and elaboration.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• A major element of the studio was the experimentation with Unity gaming software as a potential representational medium, and the subsequent digital model as an archival artifact.  The house was built long before BIM and digital drawings, so the generation of this model required managing and processing information, often contradictory or incomplete, from a wide range of sources.  Then reconciling the many constraints and inaccuracies to create a product that could serve the many roles needed to make it a viable and compelling asset.
• The architecture studio enlisted the assistance of the gaming design Tesseract Studio to consult on and help organize the multiple digital platforms.  I volunteered to lead the efforts in creating the digital model that would later be used to create a physical wood model, new illustrations, and the playable VR 3d digital model that would also become an archival file.
• Tesseract offered to teach students involved the Unity software and the relevant workflows.  I was initially the responsible for the entirety of the construction of the digital model, later assistance was provided with the finishing details.  I was in the position of not only creating the model, but communicating, managing, and coordinating the different constituent teams relaying on the model for their projects.  The challenges faced, while difficult, ultimately allowed me a unique perspective in this collaborative studio.  Receiving and processing inputs from different fields, managing teams, and doing personal investigations into the construction of the home allowed me to learn more thoroughly about the project from the macro level down to the micro scale, both historically and physically.

Environment mapping:  

Given that the project was about documentation of existing architecture, it was important to represent the furnishings and materials with as much accuracy as possible.  While the building itself showed signs of aging, imagination of what the original materials and textures looked like was needed to represent the home in its original splendor.  To achieve this goal, an inventory of the materials and furnishings was created and then analyzed.  I then created texture maps, either from images of the project taken on site, or through manipulation of existing maps, to ultimately represent with as much accuracy as possible the original look and feel of the home.