Book Carving

Our first project this semester is exploring exhumation through carving an old textbook. I have been given an old Modern Architecture book and I have to interpret the book in some way through carving the pages, cover, spine, edges, etc. WHAT? How am I supposed to do that? A) there are so many different ways you can carve a book and B) how am I supposed to interpret all of modern architecture in a single art piece.

Well I can start by thinking of what modern architecture means to me and define it as transforming something into another object that looks nothing like the original form / function / form. So why not go to town on the bandsaw in the wood shop and start cutting up the book to look like a cluster of pages and cover? Because that's too spuratic of course. Modern architecture is more refined and clean lines in my eyes. So taking the book to the wood shop I came up with this...

It's an abstract interpretation of a skyline. With the cover rising above the smaller forms, the slits act as the varying heights of sky scrapers. The curled pages underneath represent the smaller buildings you would find in the city only if you were up close and walking around them.