Bauhaus High-rise

Thank’s to the art history class I’m currently taking I discovered a little more about the history of architecture here in Montreal. I thought I knew a little about the Bauhaus architecture, but somehow I never realized just how much of our beautiful city was defined by it. I’m not sure who got the credit for designing this apartment block on DeMaisoneuve West, near Concordia University, but it would be hard not to see the in fluencies of Walter Gropius and his contemporaries. I wanted to emphasize the stoic-elegance of this giant finger of a building, and find a way to diminish the visual distractions that are arising all around it. The first step was to create the upward perspective and grab an angle that gives the viewer a sense of the weight of the structure. Changing the muted blue of the cloudy skies was the beginning of the play and I couldn’t decide on the most imposing colour. I was playing with the feelings of a background made from melted pastel crayons, and the result felt amazing and ominous at the same time.

However, something was still missing and it was the perspective of height. This isn’t a skyscraper, as you can see if you count the floors, but is feels like it towers over the cityscape around it. So I played with adding more clouds and blur the top in the far way sky. The funny thing was when I did this, the feeling that the building belonged to another time arose. I tweaked the saturation and detail and transported it back into the Seventies when our city had much more air pollution.

See more Living with Visions @ Arts M.Perron: http://www.1-mario-perron.pixels.com