Cape Cod

The Kugel/Gips House and Stingrays’ Egg Purses

 

 

Our trip to Cape Cod was on the last Thursday.  We set off the journey at 8.30 am, from RISD, and we arrived there at around 10.30 am.  Cape Cod is a peninsula, in Massachusetts, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.  Although we had heard that Cape Cod was popular for Americans to spend their Summer time with outdoor activities such as beach walking, kayaking, and fishing, our aim of this trip was to visit the Cape Modern Houses.  It was a special time for us to visit this place with the guidance from a specialist of this field, and it helped me to broaden my perception about this style of building more correctly.  For me, the most two favorite things from this trip were the Kugel/Gips house and Stingrays’ egg purses.

 

The Kugel/Gips house was one of the Bauhaus buildings we visited this time.  For me, it had some special different characteristics from other houses.   First, it was a small and simple house located nearby the water.  The next quality was that it had a harmony of using two different forms.  When I first saw this building on its North side, it was very solid and stood calmly with approximately 5-6 planes.  It was made by concrete blocks, wood, and mirror, but from this side, almost of the materials we saw were concrete blocks.  Thus, the quality of materials made the building on this side more solid than other houses we saw here.  After that when we went to its South side, the form of the house was open and connected to its environment especially the water beside.  In addition, on the west side, we could see its structure and cantilever, which was similar to the composition of abstract painting in modernist movement in term of using rhythm, plane, and space.  Also, the structure was not weight down by the gravity.  It stayed like a floating form in space.  The last one was that this building was created by Charlie Zehnder, a RISD alumni, with suggestion from Frank Lloyd Wright.  Both of them came here and spent two nights talking about the plan with each other.  Frank Lloyd Wright was well known as a master architect with the concept of Organic architecture, which concerned about form and function were one, and every building should grow naturally from its environment.

 

Stingrays’ egg purses were protective cases for Stingrays’ eggs.  In the beginning, it was difficult to everybody to know what it was.  It was a very extraordinary creature for two reasons.  First, every part of its form were functional.  The case was for protection the egg inside.  Also, it could be floating or buoyed up on the sea. Its tendrils from each corner could help to anchor itself with the seaweed and rocks for protection the embryos developing inside.  When the embryos hatched out from the case.  The empty cases would wash up on beaches.  The other one was that its form had some abstract qualities and related to its environment.  It was organic, but nobody knew what it was.  It might come from the ocean, or it might be a kind of seed from the tree.  Each case could stay harmoniously both in the ocean and shoreline.  I used to think that the tamarind fruit was a very special product design by nature, but the Stingrays’ egg purses made me to rethink about that.

 

In conclusion, my trip to Cape Cod was very interesting because I could use this opportunity to learn something from both aesthetic development of human beings and creativity of nature mentioned above.  Without any knowledge in this world, what we could do and learn.  I hoped that I could use this experience to rethink about myself and continued to learn and respect one another more.