Mar Vista Residence
[Images Redacted]
The build is a faithful recreation of Octal's RL home designed by mid-century modernist Gregory Ain and is presented as a kind of archeological artifact, complete with removable roof and interpretive center-style signage outside the driveway. This sense of removal is heightened by its disconnection with the surrounding context, as the build sits on a block and is sited several meters below the grade of the adjacent roadway that runs through the sim. As well, there have been no deviations from the purity of the reconstruction made in the name of typical scaling and camera issues, and oddly enough one could suggest the required switch to mouselook seems to heighten this sense of a place removed from everyday SL existence, representing a curious juxtaposition of how the third-person view is seen as more indicative of 'direct' experience.
As an aside, the whole thing strangely parallels an RL visit to the work of one of Gregory Ain's better known contemporaries, Rudolph Schindler. The Schindler House has been decommissioned as a functioning residence and is now home to the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, a North American offshoot of the MAK in Vienna. While there I encountered an installation whereby one of the rooms of the house was completely covered in white foamboard, a material traditionally used in architectural models, essentially turning the entire area into a full scale abstraction. This sudden grinding of my cognitive gearbox forced a similar yet opposite transition, from first person to third, and all of a sudden by standing in a 1:1 scale model the architectural artifact became more real.
So my sincere thanks to you Octal, for creating this seam in my space-time continuum, and for keeping your bathroom so clean.
Update: Nearly one year later the Mar Vista Residence is still standing, and continues to impress. Check out Hamlet Au's feature on it as a part of his 'The World From My Window' series over at New World Notes.
1 Comments:
This build still blows my mind to this day, and so does the accompanying writeup you did, Chip. =D
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