Shadow Box

I chose to look closely at the relationship to the outside within the Villa Mairea. There are many relationships such as in the living room where one experience neither the containment of traditional interiors nor the 'flowing space' of modern architecture, it's like wandering through a forest where spaces form and reform around you. Also the timber cladding is an evocation of the texture of bark as well as the continuous pine-strip suspended ceiling that's pierced with 520 000 holes to admit air conditioning to achieve the atmosphere within the forest. The specific point I chose to look at however if the relationship between light inside and outside. I built a cubed model which shows the shadows created within the natural and the man made environment. Alvar Aalto was using the concept of light within the forest within the building itself. The forest is drawn into the building through the full height glazing which is represented at the top of the cube. 

The shadows shown within the model of the natural environment are of the leaves and the trees. 

The library shows a horizontal slice of the forest where shafts of light suggest the familiar broken sunlight of the forest edge. This is the same as when late afternoon sun slants through the main staircase which contains the vertical wooden columns. 

This was probably my least successful model in terms of beauty, however, it still contained a theory which I feel helped with understanding theVilla Mairea in more depth and it also contains an idea which I believe I can take into project three.