Perry Kulper | Revisited

Some weeks ago, we wrote a Brief Post about Perry Kulper’s work, that we think it’s really interesting, especially the way his drawings shows complete representations of architecture ideas but also as art works. As we said in that post there is a lack of information about Kulper on the net, so we decided to contact him and now we have more information to share [Thanks Perry!!].

Some of the projects developed by Kulper are:

The Central California History Museum competition. In 2000, the competition was sponsored by the Fresno Historical Society, and the challenge was to build a 45,000 sq ft museum to display the relationships of the land of Central California and human kind from aboriginal times to the present.

Thematic drawing

Muse drawing machines / archival surface, proto-formal drawing

Museum. Section

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Some other works:

Fast twitch, site plan

Fast Twitch. Elevation Study

Metaspheric zoo, strategic thematic drawing

Now, we’re going to be focused in the project David’s Island Competition, because Kulper has shared with us a brief text so we can have a sense of some of the thinking-framing of the work [all the text below was sent by Perry Kulper via e-mail]:

“The David’s Island Ideas Competition focused on a small island off the coast of New York. The structure and content of the programming was left to the discretion of each competitor. Historically, the island has been occupied by Siwanoy Indians, by agricultural inscriptions, by a prospective ink factory, by a military base and by a regional power authority. Since 1973 there has been no sanctioned activity on the island and the once proud and dominant military structures are now abandoned amidst a regenerative natural environment.

The proposal for the island attempts creative engagement with a range of issues including: the islander’s experience of remoteness and isolation, the propagation of maritime mythologies and folklore, the manifestations of successive insurgencies and divergent occupations, the cultural import of drift, migration and transience, the latent potential for constructed inundations, the real and imagined sensing of suppressive scopic (panoramic and panoptic) regimes, the representational practices and influences of nautical cartography, the prospective elusiveness of nocturnal ephemera and the literal and strategic deployment of military jargon.”

“A number of specific tactics are initiated, primarily through drawing. The Strategic Plot oscillates between concrete spatial proposals and notations for further development. Representational borders are opened with the hope of sustaining a more fluid ideological, critical and material amalgamation. The interventions are generated as ways to augment, qualify and occasionally negate, existing island conditions. Additionally, there are several relational characteristics that propagate the new and point toward the unforeseen, continually qualifying the emergent temporal dynamics of the island.

While it is difficult to develop in detail the full range of deployments, I hope to point to a more extensive sensibility by articulating a specific intervention. A series of new concrete walls with cold rolled stainless steel details are inserted into the gaps of the existing eastern facing sea wall- they range in length from 200- 600 feet. These ‘gills’ perform permeable border tasks, facilitate kelp harvesting and act as imaginative landings for mythical sea travelers. Conceptually, they access and establish more extensive structural relations in the territories of imaginative and real nautical migration, emergent marine ecologies and the use of biological processes, in this case respiration, as a metaphorical catalyst. Additionally, a series of polyp labs comb the ‘gills’, parasitically gathering data regarding the changing environmental status of these synthetic ecologies. Here, quests for productive knowledge intermingle with imagination and illusory projection, loosening the authoritative grip of quantitative information and analytical domination.”

Davids Island Competition, detail 1

“A number of other interventions (including an inaccessible divide, or, axis of mutiny, camouflage surfaces, landing ‘vessel’, labyrinths of emptiness, or, air turbulence fields, moving and mis-coordinated landscapes, a machinic surveillance field, erosion surfaces, polished metamorphic rock gardens, ‘ballasted’ space, an attractive shell surface, ‘easement’ fencing, a ‘multiplied’ officer’s headquarters, bird colony lines, photo ‘ops’, panoramic steel walls and ‘no fly zones’) mingle, interfere with and remain indifferent to the bounded and fugitive aspects of the island. Tactically disposed, these messengers attempt to deal with the history, physicality and projective aspects of the island, sea and mainland. A variety of new event infrastructures prompt a tensional play between tyrannies of control and borderless wandering. Tourist practices and natural cycles coalesce with a range of formal and material dispositions spawning a range of correspondences to limits and the unbounded.”

Davids Island Competition, detail 2

Davids Island Competition, detail 3

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UPDATE [28.05.2010]
Perry Kulper kindly sent us two more drawings to include in this post, so we can have all of his fantastic work all together. Let’s see:

Bleached Out: De-Commissioning Domesticity: relational drawing v.01 From the project Bleached Out: De-commissioning Domesticity [2003]

Spatial Blooms, proto-formal drawing from the project Spatial Blooms [2009]

Spatial Blooms, Test Tube Berm

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Some images has been updated on [04.04.2011] as Perry Kulper kindly sent us three more drawings of his on-going projects. To make it clear, the three new images updated above are:

1. Museum, Section
2. Fast Twitch. Elevation Study
3. Spatial Blooms. Test Tube Berm

We want to say thanks again to Perry and hope to keep you updated about his future works.