Response 4

Although my stool did not hold a person’s weight for a very long time (I would say it held my weight for maybe 10 seconds), Oleg Grabar in Mediation of Ornament said that “good architecture is always meant to be an invitation to behave in certain ways.” In my case, my stool was meant to behave and look like an arm chair. My goal for this project was to make my chair look appealing and comfortable to the viewer. However, it obviously needed more work on the support system and structure. For this project, I wanted to really focus on the chair’s ornamentation and details. I cut four slits in the cardboard and folded the cardboard sheet together into a box. I cut more slits for the arm rests once the chair resembled a box-like structure which helped support the back to stand on its own. The chair had originally held weight for a longer time before I had cut slits for the arm rests; I had originally let them sit on top of the seated area. But once I cut the slits for them, the arm rests put a crease in the seated area and pushed it down so that it did not hold as much weight as I had originally intended. However, I think that if my chair had some sort of support specifically underneath the seated area it could have held more weight for a longer period. I thought that the front side of the chair had more abstracted details because the viewer could not quite understand how the chair (temporarily) supported a person’s weight. The viewer could see a few slits but could not really see where the slits folded into. However, the back of the chair had articulated details because the viewer could see where I folded and cut slits to make a support system.