For IDEAS CITY 2015, The Drawing Center presents Balmori Associates’ Meditation Room: Horizon a constructed continuous wall of paper where the overlapping of two dot matrix systems comes together to create a visible horizon. A city is distinguished by the presence of multiple horizon lines stacked one over another. Meditation Room: Horizon explores basic traits of landscape, in this case, the effect of an expansive open horizon—water and sky—inside a busy urban one. 

 

Join us on Saturday, May 30 from Noon-6PM in Sara D. Roosevelt Park near the corner of Chrystie and Houston. 

 

Balmori Associates is an international urban and landscape design firm founded by Diana Balmori. Balmori Associates is recognized across the globe for its creative interfacing of landscape and architecture and expanding the boundaries between nature and structure. Read more here.

 

Produced by Aimee Good, Director of Education and Community Programs

 

 

 

Aimee Good: For IDEAS CITY Festival 2015, which explores the concept of invisibility, you will place Meditation Room: Horizon in the center of one of the densest urban situations possible: a street festival, representing 100 different creative, cultural entities near and around the New Museum at the Bowery and Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Houston and Chrystie Streets.

Please describe your relationship to meditation and landscape.

 

Diana Balmori: The Meditation Room has to do with the horizon and its uninterrupted horizon line. The Meditation Room creates in a very small urban space the feeling of amplitude belonging to a landscape. When I observe people in parks there is this feeling of amplitude, I think, due to the fact that you have one horizon line that continues in your peripheral vision. I’ve been very interested in exploring the creation of a landscape that is not interrupting peripheral vision.

 

Brett Littman: Diana, one thing I am reminded of when you talk about amplitude is when I was younger I would go up to the top of the World Trade Center. I think that is a kind of landscape and I just want to clarify, when you say amplitude, you mean a kind of infinity? Also, we think in America that the Western deserts are really where our great landscapes are. These areas are not vegetal at all. They are rocks and sand. Would you consider this an ample landscape?

 

Diana Balmori: Yes, both examples have amplitude as your experience of them is of peripheral vision without interruption which can give you a feeling of infinity. Uninterrupted, the horizon line expands your feeling of space.

 

Brett Littman: Would you link this project then to some of your thoughts about drawing? Your entire career has been about drawing, particularly drawing the landscape. How do you see this project in relationship to the work you’ve been doing, both as making drawings, visual objects, and architecture?

 

Diana Balmori: This project very much relates to creating drawings that represent landscapes that are not defined by separate objects within it, but that express the continuity of space. In drawing we like to use a dot matrix approach, as one among others. Another approach is that of juxtaposing very intense patterns against each other which makes the line defining the object disappear. I’ve been very interested in any way that you can keep the continuous spatial flow. Therefore, the dot matrix greatly interests me because the space in between the dots achieves continuity that also juxtaposes the textures so that the outlines of objects disappear.

 

Brett Littman: In some ways your drawings are kind of an argument against the continuous line, a kind of Matissian single line drawing which the eye must follow, which is a path. You’re proposing a different way of thinking about vision.

 

Diana Balmori: I am, and here I argue for the outlines of objects to disappear, but that there be a continuity of the horizon line paying attention to peripheral vision.

 

Brett Littman: The way that vision organizes itself in relationship to drawing?

 

Diana Balmori: Right, absolutely. I think that peripheral vision is a very important part of seeing in a landscape and it hasn’t been explored. Peripheral vision is essential to appreciating and understanding a landscape, central vision alone cannot capture it. I’ve been talking with a vision neuroscientist about this and we are jointly exploring it. We’re getting some interesting results in measurements of it that we’re using in our design practice.

 

Brett Littman: When people are viewing these dot matrix images, are you finding that it is changing their perceptual understanding? Does it force them to think about the way that they see and the way the eye and the brain coordinate?

 

Diana Balmori: I think so. It produces a different relationship to the drawing. As you well know, and you must know extremely well, better than I—anybody who changes the standard of how you draw and how you represent things, gets a lot of, “Oh, I don’t understand that” or “It isn’t acceptable!” It is for landscape like the 1910 moment for painting and the other arts, a critical point.

 

Brett Littman: As you said, you’ve been looking at a lot of painting. Surely the Impressionists like Bonnard were employing similar kinds of ideas. Mass is really made by color and by putting color together, but not by making particular lines, but by very simple brush strokes that eventually built the form.

 

Diana Balmori: Absolutely. Paintings like Monet’s Lily Pond with coarser and coarser brushstrokes and yet so immense and devoid of objects, that when you come close up to it, it breaks down completely.

 

Brett Littman: Let’s go back to the Meditation Room.

 

In terms of the way that we’re going to be, again in the middle of this very active park, we’re probably at one of the busiest intersections of New York City, Chrystie and Houston Streets with lots of car noise and other distractions. People will come into this meditation room and let’s walk through what that experience in your mind should raise for the participant—the interactive experience.

 

Diana Balmori: The interactive experience for me is that suddenly there is this feeling of space and continuity of the horizon line—it’s not interrupted. There’s a moment, we are thinking of a ten minute moment, where to start out you put your eyes on the horizon line and feel surrounded by sky and sea only; you can close your eyes for the rest of the time, if you are so inclined, and visualize this internally. There is this quiet that comes when one has this feeling of space. I think it is a creative moment, but it is the perception of it, in itself, that is a moment of meditation.

 

Brett Littman: We may find that the surrounding communities who live around Sara D. Roosevelt Park are already quite knowledgeable about how to tune out noise and the outside urban world. I know that in the morning there are many Chinese people who do Tai Chi in that park and I imagine they might be well-suited to the experience of a meditation room.

 

Are we asking people to draw anything?

 

Diana Balmori: Yes. We have blank sketchbooks and have prepared a rubber stamp to prompt people to draw. The customized rubber stamp creates a dot matrix pattern similar to what will be visually experienced in the Meditation Room that makes the perception of the horizon line fuzzier; and totally blank paper is available too, so that people can take whatever direction they want in response to the experience. We have provided beautiful colored pencils and black lead drawing pencils. It can be color, it can be in line, whatever. We encourage people to draw something that comes out of that moment, or contrast the continuous horizon with the multiple busy horizons of the city.

 

Brett Littman: Do you meditate?

 

Diana Balmori: Yes, I do.

 

Brett Littman: Is that a daily practice for you?

 

Diana Balmori: It is a daily practice. Ten minutes. I’ve gone all around New York City trying different things from symposiums at the Rubin Museum of Art to a Zen monastery in Brooklyn. Different forms and different ways. I found a practice that is from a British monk, Andy Puddicombe, who made a ten minute meditation practice that you can put on your iPad. A very useful, no-nonsense, direct piece which is based on all of the work done in Buddhist monasteries and Zen monasteries, but that can fit into one’s busy urban schedule.

 

Brett Littman: When you’re drawing is the object coming into more focus for you or are you stepping away from the object? Is it unraveling?

 

Diana Balmori: It is unraveling. I can’t say that the experience is always the same. What happens is there are different layers of concentration for seeing and therefore you begin to see more things, but it undoes that first impression. It’s only deep concentration that does that. Deep concentration means that you’re stuck in this busy highway that you have up in your mind which is constantly telling you, “Oh, the next thing is this and the next thing is that. Have you done this, have you done that?”—Drawing stops everything. It creates a meditative moment.

 

I do think that the drawing practice can lead you to a very rich meditation practice, too. I would look at it the other way around as well, that the meditation practice can take you to a very good drawing.

 

Brett Littman: One other thing I want to bring to the fore is that the theme for IDEAS CITY 2015 is the Invisible City, and again, we are placing a meditation room in the middle of a busy place, and we’re asking people to pause and then to draw after. We want to set up the idea that meditation leads to good drawing, “good” in quotations of course. We’re not interested in the quality.

 

Would you talk a little about the connection to an idea of invisibility? I have some thoughts about why your project actually touches on the invisible but I wanted to hear from you about anything that came up while you were conceiving of the project.

 

Diana Balmori: Essentially, you are going into a space and you’re not really seeing anything in it. There is only that line of the horizon that orients you on the earth. It takes all the visual noise away and, therefore, it begins to dissolve the city. It is like a cloak, like an invisible cloak that you are putting on.