London Art
"Culver's geometric compositions draw influence from urban architecture and the cityscapes that are created. His spontaneous, integrated environments map a timeless journey, allowing the viewer a mesmerising experience of colour and form."
Ms. Johanna Grawunder
Nagoya International Design Prize - Japan 2000
"This work is very unique for it is the beautiful hand drawing of 3-dimensional environmental design for the computer, not the design created by computer. Architects in the past were only required to draw a blueprint on a paper. On the other hand, young architects at the end of the 20th century are still unsure about how best to draw up their plans in the coming 21st century. This work expresses such instability well."
Design Architecture News:
Young architect wins international design competition for artwork.
Editor's note: Christian Culver's art, beautiful hand-drawings of three-dimensional environmental design, recently won an international design competition, the Nagoya Design Do, Japan. The competition was created to provide an opportunity for young designers to develop their skills and exchange ideas. Competing against more than 1,000 entries, Culver was the only American entrant to win. The theme was 'the future passed through,' and the competition asked for work that depicted 'the power of life encapsulated in space and time.'
Presented here is a statement by Culver about his artwork.
The notion that architecture has been reduced to simply an object, void of cultural, societal, environmental, and historical affinity raises the question whether individuals and society are losing the capability to empathize. Our constructed environment is primarily dependent upon and made comprehensible by means of vision, the ability to 'see.' To 'see' is to not just look, but to observe any and everything, and to be curious to learn. To 'see' is to empathize.
The contemporary Metropolis is a series of fragmented 'instances' that, when rarely visualized as a whole, become a series of blurred locales referenced only by shape, color, and image. The transformation from a three-dimensional environment into two dimensions, or from an 'architectural environment' into an 'art environment', becomes the 'in between' through which my work is generated. A Metropolis is a navigational landscape; a series of adventures for the engaged. My work is the two-dimensional journey of such a landscape. It is a completely unique journey for each individual - always taking on new meanings.
My attempt is to engage the viewer on two levels, one on a large scale, and secondly on a small scale. The large scale investigates the relationships of colors, fields, and the viewers' sense of place. The small scale focuses upon very detailed, fragmented, yet linked 'instances' or 'discoveries', that as a whole create a relationship; hence 'Coalescent Constructions'.
To 'see', an individual must elicit/explore their emphatic tendencies to absorb a two-dimensional visual impression - an image with direct links to a physical reality; displaced from its reality yet maintaining a coalescent cultural parallelism. The individual obtains an abstracted image - an image that attempts to clarify an environment and an architectural condition. Empathy must be employed in order to obtain a reading, observation of detail is crucial to the way of seeing. Ideally, the image would ultimately allow the individual to assimilate a method of seeing, which becomes directly applicable to a three-dimensional environment from which the image was detracted. The 'image' in this case is an image void of action/representation. It, however, portrays an inherent method of acting and seeing. The image belongs wholly to the past, present, and future. The message presented by the image becomes a catalyst for the imagination; eliciting a process of curiosity, questioning, understanding, assimilation, and reposition.
If this process can translate and apply itself to a three-dimensional reality, an 'architectural cultural biography' is assimilated. It can then establish itself as a precedent for further qualification of acquisition and inquiry into cultural edifices, identities, and repositories.
The action transposes itself into the assimilated map - a subconscious map through which a new identity, created by the individual, elicits cultural identities and actions that provide transparent vehicles for the future.
Christian Culver
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