Gnomo
By Jonathan Enns
Project Gnomo is a 12 m tall sandstone solar clock that cross breeds ancient forms of placemaking and antique processes for time keeping with solar projections in digital script. It aims to tie a fleeting visual language of pixels to a deeply physical and connected process.
Gnomo is part of a solution-led stream of projects at Humanics.io—a design lab I direct at the University of Waterloo—that experiments with the ways in which construction process, design procedure, and material performance can become expressive elements in art and architecture.
The technologies for solar time were, are, and will always be vitally important to humans. The science of solar clock design (an art performed by “gnomonists” or ”dialists”) has a rich history of data-driven invention stretching back thousands of years. Essential to navigation, energy, agriculture, planning, and industry and a driver of the enlightenment and the industrial revolutions, technologies for extrapolating solar altitude, azimuth, latitude, and earth rotation into time through projection have given rise to miraculous, intricate, and beautiful inventions through the ages.
Gnomo reimagines these technologies through the use of digital design tools. The resulting parametric script, which begins with the hourly solar location data and subtracts a channel of sandstone from the column for each hour, produces a complex swiss cheese of voids that are unique to the latitude, longitude, and elevation of the design site. While borrowing from the mass and scale of the obelisk (a traditional placemaking device) Gnomo’s expression is neither symbolic nor minimal, instead expressing its own processes of geometric subtraction and intersection.
Gnomo projects in digital text using ancient forms and techniques, conflating the fleeting language of pixels with the deep time of solar geometry. As a testbed for new languages of form, it attempts to speak by expressing the process and procedures of its own making.
All images courtesy of the author
Bio
Jonathan Enns is a hybrid designer, strategist, inventor and entrepreneur. With consulting experience in the technology and IOT industries, and a background in architecture and interdisciplinary practice, his work looks to find new data driven, human centered foundations for architecture and spatial innovation. Jonathan runs the Humanics Lab, a think tank dedicated to human-centred approaches to design research, experiential prototyping, and human impact quantification methods and is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo.
