Stunning handmade models, original sketches and beautiful photographs were on display at the Atkinson Gallery Friday night, featuring the artistry of world-renowned architect and environmentalist Randall Stout.
Accentuating the importance of a building’s imperfections and trial and error, Stout’s gallery illustrates architecture at its peak for students who are just beginning. The gallery includes 13 of Stout’s original duct-taped and super-glued mini-models, 30 of his earliest drawings that show a building’s modest beginnings, an entire wall devoted to photographs and informational graphics about each of his projects and several screens that display images and time-lapses of the construction process.
“I thought it was important to illustrate every aspect of the architectural process,” Stout said. “I wanted students to see everything, from the earliest moments of creativity to the technologies of building a model.”
Stout’s ideas have become the framework for visionary structures all over the world.
They include art galleries, museums, bridges, power plants, and recreational facilities. His latest project, the Art Gallery of Alberta, was just recently completed in January. The 26-month process was all captured on film and is on display in the Atkinson using time-lapsed frames that shows everything from the mounds of dirt and tractors to the entirely finished gallery.
This new exhibit in the Atkinson demonstrates a step into unfamiliar territory, for students and for Gallery director Dane Goodman.
“We don’t usually display architecture shows,” Goodman said. “So this is a great creative shift for us and for every art student to experience.”
The gallery opened at 5 p.m. and began with a steady stream of people, who gazed in awe at the models on display. Stout’s design team decided to spread the handmade mini-models on a long, rectangular table in the center of the room, which are then surrounded by three bigger, more impressive structures.
Two of these were created by hand, a process that takes four to six weeks and three men to complete. The last one, enshrined in a glass case, was designed by an elaborate 3D architecture program that can memorize every nook and cranny of a model or sketch and construct any variety of buildings.
After viewing the amazing complexities of the detailed buildings, which Goodman called “just dynamite,” many visitors delighted in the view of Santa Barbara while munching on treats. chocolate chip cookies, lemon bars, turkey wraps, coconut shrimp, coffee and lemonade were all available to the public.
Although many people came and went throughout the night, around 50 individuals stuck around for a chance to ask Stout questions. He spoke about his hopes for the future in architecture, his childhood in Tennessee and, most importantly, his influences and methods for developing a building.
“You can never totally sit and weave together all of these different geometries,” Stout said. “That’s why I visualize and design by hand all of the buildings.”
The sketches don’t always precede the construction of the models. Sometimes he’ll design a model and then adjust certain small details through his drawings, which, at the end of designing a building, could amount to “sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds,” he said.
Stout has been practicing architecture for nearly 30 years and hopes to continue doing so for 30 more years.
With an Institute for the Visual Arts already being tentatively scheduled for construction at the University of Alabama, that goal seems to be a near certainty.
Stout’s gallery will remain on display until March 26, and he will also be holding a public lecture on March 17 at 4:30 p.m. in the Humanities Building – Room 111.
