Artistry, civil engineering combine in student's honors thesis project


March 27, 2012

It was at a time when he was deep into engineering and urban planning studies that a seemingly unrelated thought popped into Sam Johnson’s head.

It came as a simple directive: “I think you should paint.” Sam Johnson Engineering Paintings Download Full Image

Johnson remembers “just having the thought like ‘I’m going to paint today and I don’t really know why.’ So I did some paintings and they were terrible at first, but I liked doing them.”

Using acrylics and watercolors, he covered canvasses with small and large free-flowing abstract images, with no intention other than engaging in a “stress-reducing, mind-relaxing” pastime.

Months later, a challenging course in structural analysis sparked something in him that he says “opened a floodgate of creativity” that he expressed through his paintings. He began giving his art more thematic direction. Some of the images he painted became more geometric, rooted in design principles and concepts he was learning in his coursework.

Johnson is a student in Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University, majoring in civil engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. He’s also studying for a minor in urban planning in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

When he first put brush to canvas almost two years ago, Johnson had no idea his paintings would form the core of the honors thesis he needed to complete to earn his degree this spring. His thesis defense session occurred at a public exhibition featuring 20 of his paintings at a small yoga-studio-turned-art-gallery near ASU’s Tempe campus.

He describes the images he used for the thesis titled The Art of Engineering as “a mixture of simplicity and wildness” in which he tried to meld the precision of engineering structures, processes and designs with artistic freedom of expression.

Some of the paintings consist of bold splashes of bright colors, others of simple monochromatic symbols, figures and shapes. Embedded in them are depictions of images representing basic technical and structural aspects of civil engineering design – cantilevered beams, concentrated load, distributed load, roll support, linearity, applied force and deflection, turbulent flow and other examples of fluid dynamics.

One abstract work is based on the kind of overhead view of traffic flow on a freeway that is commonly used in transportation planning and engineering studies.

Another painting presents an impressionistic aerial view of a cityscape, like the photographic maps urban planners use to show land development density.

“You see both structure and artistry in Sam’s work, which are the characteristics that great works of engineering combine,” says ASU engineering professor Brad Allenby, who was on the committee that evaluated Johnson’s thesis project.

“Art and engineering are, at their core, creative expressions of the human spirit,” Allenby adds. “We’re fortunate to be at a university and in an engineering school where the parallels between these two pursuits are understood and valued.”  

Johnson says discovering this “creative outlet” and finding in it a connection between his aesthetic sensibility and his technical bent has helped heighten his academic and career interests.

After finishing his undergraduate studies, he plans to return to ASU to begin studies in a new sustainable engineering master’s degree program.

“Maybe these two ways of thinking, like an artist and like an engineer, can be merged,” he says.

Joe Kullman

Science writer, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

480-965-8122

MainStage brings adaptation of Isabel Allende's novel to Galvin Playhouse


March 27, 2012

The haunting debut novel of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende comes to the ASU MainStage April 5-15, 2012, in an adaptation that explores the struggles of four generations of women from a privileged family as they face a powerful patriarch and 20th century dictatorship in an un-named South American nation.

Rachel Bowditch, assistant professor in the ASU School of Theatre and Film in the Herberger Institute, directs the final production of the MainStage Season. Bowditch says that the play, The House of the Spirits, captures the spirit and the atmosphere of the book, but stands as a new work in its own right. The final production of the ASU MainStage Season, "The House of the Spirits'' opens April 5. Photo by Tim Trumble Photography. Download Full Image

Caridad Svich's adaptation won the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Francesca Primus Prize and has received numerous other awards in previous productions staged in theatres across the country and internationally.

It includes original music and lyrics by Svich, who writes in the program notes: “I am indebted to Allende for her story, and the inspiration it has offered me in turn to create a new piece for the theatre: a response, a mirror image, a conversation, an ‘after-Allende.’”

“I am struck by Allende’s language,” Bowditch says. “One sentence in the book: ‘Slowly but surely she (Clara) transformed the empty rooms into a labyrinth of secret nooks,’ inspired our set design. The set is a multi-leveled, layered structure that allows the actors to move within a labyrinth of memory and time like a faded sepia photograph.”

To convey the 50-year journey through history that occurs in the play, a multi-media production of documentary-style images convey a Junta and the devastation of an earthquake as well as the poetic, visual world of the characters and supernatural landscapes of Allende’s imagination, Bowditch says.

The House of the Spirits is part of a weekend of events devoted to the first Arizona NoPassport conference April 13-15. NoPassport is a gathering of theatre artists and scholars devoted to "dreaming the Americas" together that was founded by Caridad Svich in New York City. For more info, see www.nopassport.org.



Public Contact: 
Laurie Trotta Valenti
ASU School of Theatre and Film
480.965.3381
laurie.trotta@asu.edu
theatreandfilm.asu.edu

Media Contact:
Laurie Trotta Valenti
ASU Herberger institute
School of Theatre and Film
480-965-3381
laurie.trotta@asu.edu