Group B Chinatown - Rhiannon - Project Update

The project has evolved a little since my last post.  Hannah and Lucy both brought up an incredibly valid point that I needed to balance out the shocking aspect of the 3000 uncounted deaths with the change in the urban landscape after those tragic events.  Really, Chinatown does become a story about perseverance, rebuilding within constraints and creating a newer, stronger identity.  It would be dismissive to only focus on 1906, so I am sculpting the neighborhood to represent the changing architectural identity that emerged afterwards amongst the ghosts of the past residents.  So much of Chinese culture is about remembering and retelling.  The architecture of Chinatown does just that.

To capture this new focus on the neighborhood character, I decided to sculpt the city blocks out of clay instead of creating the photoshop collage facades.  The buildings will start out at the bottom of the piece as more rectilinear, reminiscent of the simple brick and mortar buildings Chinatown inhabited before the fire and progress to more, while abstract, Chinese inspired and ornate structures.  They will need some touching up after they dry, but you can get an idea of how the streets will lay out.  I am going to construct a base that all of the buildings will attach to, keeping true to the topographical slope at the bottom left corner of chinatown.  I have been using the negative space pieces I cut out of the "streets" for scale, but they will not be present in the final piece.  I do want to account for curbs so that the streets and the "people" in them are slightly recessed into the model.

Thanks so much Hannah and Lucy for the feedback.  It is really shaping my process.  More to come...