Jacob Hunwick: Week 1 Castle

Concept:

For my castle I created a chess set and utilized the pieces and the board squares as
modular elements. Chess is originally a war game. Within the game each player has a
preferred opening. An opening is just the first four or five moves in the game, popular
combinations come to have names. On the top of the castle the pieces are arranged in
my favorite opening the Ruy Lopez I see this opening as my castle because it is one that
I play often and feel comfortable with. MC Escher’s work inspired the overall layout
(see escher-reflections, escher-chess).

I wanted to maximize the amount of reflections, and interesting refraction's. I achieved this
first by creating two layers of tiled board, and placing sphere-topped pawns to hold up
each corner.

Techniques:

Chess pieces are created by spinning blocks of wood with a lathe, and carving out curves
as the wood spins at high speeds. The process is similar to pottery, only a lathe is subtractive.
In order to get a lathe-look, I drew out the contour of each piece and revolved it around
its center.

Next, I duplicated and arranged the pieces on a standard 8x8 board. For the additional
elements I duplicated pawns, a rook and knights to hold up the board on top of a larger
platform.

Materials:

Chess sets are traditionally wooden or glass. For my variation I chose white and black
glass for the light and dark pieces respectively. For the board I used black glass and
24 carat gold. The selection was primarily to make interesting reflections as mentioned
in the concept. For the large knights below the smaller board I used a dark wood to make
the large corner pawns stand out. I originally had the knights as glass, but this made the
\reflections very messy and overly complex.