Studio Potter 2015 Volume 43 Number 2 Summer/Fall 2015 | Page 18
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Studio Potter
Shawn Schuler, 2014. Sketches and notes for the interior design of the Artstream.
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BIO
Camila grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was lucky enough to be introduced to ceramics in
high school. Recently, she completed a post-baccalaureate year at Syracuse University, and is currently
living in Fort Collins finishing up a second post-baccalaureate year at Colorado State University.
CONTACT
[email protected]
for a great deal of wood, making them
expensive and hard to build, as well as too
heavy. With the presentations taking place
midsemester, Del was concerned that we
have enough time to fabricate the interior.
He brought the two groups together,
considered everyone’s ideas and designs,
and then synthesized a parametric, flexible,
and streamlined design that retained the
students’ ideas. Some of the main elements,
such as a basic shelf and support system,
were fixed, but within each, there was ample
room to change scale, shape, and quantity.
The design called for five different shelf
levels, from bench to eye level, each wrapping around the interior of the Airstream in
different lengths. The layers of the shelves
mimicked geological lines in the earth
that you might see while driving through
the American west. The shelves would be
propped by trusses rising from the floor
to the top shelf, which allowed modular
sections that could be installed inside
or outside of the trailer. When deciding
the shape of the shelves, the students
considered how water might move through
a space, flowing faster in some areas and
slower in others. They thought about what
kinds of pots would be displayed in the
places where people would pause to look
more carefully, and what would be shown in
the area where traffic moved more quickly.
Del’s design distilled all of the students’
important design concepts into simple
parameters with the result that the final
design was beautiful, but also possible to
construct with the time, materials, technology, and skills available.
As the class homed in on a final design
concept, the students began to delegate
tasks based on personal aptitude. Shawn