John Pruitt Creative

www.facebook.com/johnwpruitt

I founded and ran "draw club" in St. Louis for 10 years.

I am an artist, architect, designer and professor based in Cape Girardeau, Mo. I do commercial graphic design work for a variety of clients and sometimes need models for specific projects. I also have my ongoing personal art. Interests there are varied. My recent focus can be understood in the following text....

In our contemporary world, we tend to judge our built environment solely on pragmatic issues of function and cost. But throughout history architecture has preoccupied itself with the relationship between visual form and meaning. This meaning in architecture goes back to before antiquity and exists to the present – varied examples are the typology of the primitive hut, the machine rationalism of the modernists, and even theories borrowed from others, like sociologists, linguistics, and feminists. But through it all, the central architectural debate has been anthropomorphic in nature – the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things and concepts. We see this correspondence in language every day. Any common architecture dictionary is filled with hundreds of terms like face - façade, eyes – oculi (meaning small windows), foot, crown, etc. It has long been accepted that these correlations are a source of meaning and beauty in architecture.

The ancient Greeks saw this analogy between architecture and the human form in the six caryatids, sculpted female figures, which serve as columns of the Erechtheum's south porch. Among Modernists, Le Corbusier is the most noted for pursuing a human based proportioning system. I could go on about these relationships, but it will suffice to say that architecture (and all the designed and built things in our environment) has a specific relationship with us, commonly referred to as the poetics of form and space.

In the contemporary context, much of this understanding has been lost. That is in part due to the sheer volume of boring buildings. This has served to decrease our visual acuity regarding architectural meaning. It is also the result of the now famous “form follows function” relationship that caused decades of preoccupation with operational performance, functionality, and rational design methodologies in design education and professional practice. The results are devoid of expression and meaning – which is the central concern of this creative project. There are three overlapping concepts I will be exploring:

a. The body/architecture relationship
as figural or representational
(Formal geometric properties)
• Proportions, shape, form, order.
• Analogy (painted lady Victorian),
• Anatomical correlation, fashion.

b. The human/building relationship
as cultural or emotional
(Metaphor, empathy, emotion)
• Building in pain, a healthy building.
• Ritual, morality of materials.
• How we feel in space.

c The people/place relationship
as functional or typological
(Ergonomics, movement)
• Defined vs. defining space and path.
• Scale, orientation, sense of place.
• Symbolism, alienation, boundaries.