McGill University School of Architecture, September - December 2016
Mile-End, Montreal
303 Design and Construction | Undergraduate Studio
To inhabitants, architectural manifestations act as communicative spaces where signs and facade expressions provide dynamic semiotics, mutually informing one another. This exchange of information between the public and buildings allows thinking of architecture’s presence as an expressive transmitter able to provoke a variable set of emotions. The notion of affective architecture is here a recurring theme, tested throughout every act, design decision, questions and answers of the course. Taking these assumptions as a point of departure, the studio investigates the potentials of buildings to act as interfaces, connecting and engaging with a community in a meaningful way and throughout various times. The M-Center project is also invested in examining and formalizing the relationship between technology, media and architecture, feeding off today’s image culture as contextual framework. Immersive art, film and time-based media all infiltrate and spill out from (and on) the built fabric. Superimposing the “soft” technological systems and the “hard” materiality of built space constitutes one of the numerous design challenges addressed in the creation of a center for the moving image.
This studio explores the idea of creating a specific yet flexible space to accommodate cinema. It ventures out towards fields of augmented territories to land at the crossing of the physical and virtual, the material and the image, the mundane and the singular, the real and the subjective, the shared and the individual. Digital techniques enable the formation of heterogeneous architectural propositions, operating consciously and conscientiously within the desensitized territories of media. Space design emerges from the meticulous task of composing, staging and rebuilding. Perceptions and recordings of these conditions, whether political, cultural, conceptual or material, are crucial to gaining a critical understanding of the work’s context.
Work by Morgan Matheson, Jacob Canac-Marquis, Mailie Belisle, Simeon Vassilev, Francis Di Pietro, Hanna Hentze, Kurin Wang, Cicily Du, Francis Garnier, Kevin Khoury, Zain Koussous.