isabella frontado

continually in progress 

For my final project of the fall 2016 semester, I worked on a scheme for the future development of River-bend Park in Cambridge. The site, which sits between the Newell Boathouse by the John F. Kennedy St. and the John W. Weeks Pedestrian Bridge, serves as a threshold between the river and the city. I sought to weave the park into the urban landscape - providing plaza and park spaces leading down to the park. Once in the river bend park, the edges step down with the topography toward the water, and eventually they tessellate out into the water. The tessellated paving blocks rise and fall at three different step heights allowing park visitors to sit along the waters edge to dangle their feet just above the water, dip their feet into the water, or submerge their feet in the water. 

Harvard Graduate School of Design | Critic: Gareth Doherty

Project Featured in The Harvard Graduate School of Design's Platform X, November 2017. 

I sought to break down the barriers around Franklin Park and provide increased access for the surrounding neighborhood and community. Focusing on the Sever Street and Walnut Avenue edges, I explored different ways of using visual, material, and auditory elements as tools for forming these connections.

I began this process thinking about how the park connects to the larger urban context. I focused specifically on routes of pedestrian access. Diagrammatically, I mapped out public transportation routes and bike routes - highlighting these routes of access in relation to the park. I identified different public amenities in the surrounding context and found that a number of schools and community support centers - eg churches, boys and girls clubs, and rehabilitation centers, and training centers - exist along the walnut street edge. I want to find a way of extending the park as a resource to the existing community network.

Through patterns of circulation, I have woven together different moments and experience into and throughout the park. These patterns of circulation, carry you through the outlook, the avenue, the veranda, and the boulders. These moments are designed to provide residents in the surrounding neighborhood spaces to gather - spaces that are both urban, sub-urban, and more natural. As visitors make there way into the park, the experience becomes increasingly more natural. 

Harvard Graduate School of Design | Critic: Silvia Benedito

Through this study, I examined the relationship between the ground plane, overhead canopy, and the shadows and light that were projected between them. I was interested in creating a subtly varied surface experience, one that wove together both hard and soft material elements along the ground plane. Using varied spacing in the paving pattern, I allowed for both fast and slow movement along the different paths. Multi-stem trees helped to break the vertical plane of the space and provided for fall of dappled light over the space. The final sketch provides for a study of how I envisioned my experience in the space.

Harvard Graduate School of Design | Critic Danielle Choi

A reflection on the objects we share with others, and the memory those objects hold once that person or people are gone. Objects can hold in them an idealized memory of the past, as well as the reality of that past as seen in the marks left on the true object’s surface. This piece is an exploration of memory - a juxtaposition of true memory with the perfection of that memory. 

Though photographs, I documented the experience of moving through the core stairwell space of a building set for demolition. Standing at the first floor landing of the then existing stairwell, you pan your vision up and down taking in the open stairwell. drawing shelves were collected from building, and were stacked so as to express the vertical movement through the building core. The photographs were mounted onto each layer, and as the viewer observed the work, they panned their vision through the layers, taking in the layers of this once existent core space.

This work calls on the visual language of Donald Judd’s, Untitled (Stack), 1969. However, unlike Judd’s pristine metal and glass works, this piece uses found objects; objects which have in them a record of human use, objects which inhabited the building’s spaces. In its use of found objects, the work also pulls in lines of dialogue from the Italian, Arte Povera Movement (1960s-1970s) which ran in parallel, and in sharp contrast to the Minimalist Movement, and in which many artists used found or hand crafted objects, in the production of their work.

¿democracia? | 2015 | 42" x 42" 

¿igualdad? | 2015 | 42" x 42" 

I last returned to Venezuela in 2015 and found a country on the brink. Violence was at an all time high and people were tired, and hungry. Despite this, government propaganda on the tv, on the radio, and on the street promised that everything was perfect and that the Revolution was alive. City walls were layered with red and white stencil spray painted government propaganda. The stencil painted images and text promised a socialism that brought equality and democracy - a far cry from the surrounding reality. 

I sought to counter these propaganda images and bring into question what these words, colors, and materials that have fueled a revolution - what these things mean today. 

Material Note | Black oil based paint with gasoline, Red oil based paint, white gesso, canvas. Text is formed in water based paint and is painted over in oil - the text repels the body of the canvas.  

I have been interested in the different marks that people leave behind and how each person although they may create a mark in the same material, use the same tool, and start at the same point of origin - they leave behind a distinct mark.

Using plexiglas, a hammer, and an awl tool, I collected the crack marks that 15 people created. Each person followed the instructions provided below. Through annotated drawings, I mapped each person’s mark. A number of factors affected the physical mark the person’s strength, the way she held the awl or the hammer, the way she held her body in reference to the point of origin. These studies are three-dimensional explorations the physical, and sometimes violent traces left behind.  

INSTRUCTIONS

1. cut 4”x4” sheet of plexiglas

2. measure the center point of the square sheet - 2 inches from each edge.

3. use the awl tool. align the tip with the center point.

4. hit the awl into the center point using the hammer.

5. hammer the awl until a crack appears in the surface (this may take several tries.)

6. another person must repeat the process.

7. compile each mark created - you may stack or lay objects out flat.

A project in a dialogue with Reflection Matrix

Through this independent study, I explored the process of translating movement into line - using the movement of a dancer as a base for exploration. Each line drawing of the dancer's movement provided me with a structural understanding of the body’s interaction within that space. I continued exploring these structural translations in alternate mediums, extruding them into a three-dimensional representation - hanging wire drawings. These three-dimensional wire drawings provided a stripped down, structural understanding of movement as it exists in three-dimensional space. As I photographed the three dimensional form, the piece flattened back into a two dimensional line drawing - the translation could only be experienced in person - as one rotated their body around the drawing. 

This disconnect in visual translation of the drawing led me to return to the two dimensional realm, translating the wire drawing shadow onto canvas. I filled the negative spaces between the lines with gesso, allowing the viewer to pass her hand over the canvas to feel the raised voids between the dancer’s structure.

I am interested in exploring how different modes of representation/translation of information can inform design and development of ideas. For this exercise, I wanted to explore ways of playing with the section line. Using mylar, I played with different ways of threading and layering site sections. This process of threading through these mylar sections morphed and pinched the material, the existing topography, into these wave like forms. This exploration provided a new spatial understanding of site topography, and also served as a tool for generating and developing ideas. 

Landscape Representation II | Harvard Graduate School of Design | Advisor Emily Wettstein

In a portrait like style, I photographed objects found on site. Each of the portraits is printed on mylar and layered. Together, the object portraits tell a story of the place and its layered site history.

Landscape Representation II | Harvard Graduate School of Design | 2017 | Advisor Emily Wettstein

Through this project, I explored the spaces our movement creates as we walk, and sought to make tangible the volumes of space we do not touch as we move. I imagined my movement through a space as if a cut through a solid volume. Creating a model of an existing space, I then filled the model with plaster, making the void a solid volume. I recorded the paths that people took through the existing space, and those paths into the mold, cutting their path. The untouched spaces became solid, impassible volumes. 

Following in the spirit Sol LeWitt, I developed a code set to produce a group drawing (see code set, left). For the drawing, I wanted participants to use a solid material that was difficult to control. I wanted variability between each drawing produced. I found that the process of cracking plexiglas provided me with this varied, yet solid mark pattern. Using plexiglas, I created circular, branch-like cracks in the material. The interplay of light over these cracks created a web like projection pattern - light matrix. The code set guides the makers in creating the cracks and producing the reflected light matrix. The final drawing is ultimately two parts. It is one, the culmination of cracks on the surface of the plexiglas, and two, the reflection of those cracks as matrices on the surface of the wall in the resulting set of drawings. The final piece is an exploration of both material and immaterial drawing. Upon other reproductions, the drawing will never appear the same. Each person creates their own mark on the glass, hitting the surface from different angles and levels of strength. The translation of points from the wall to the plexiglas will change, and the direction of the drawing may shift.