McGill University School of Architecture, September - December 2015
Parc-Extension, 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 Playtime 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.
In collaboration with Clothilde Caille-Levesque.
Work by Zachary Mathurin, Meaghen Dionne, Linsen Chai, Katie Peruniak, Sara Beauchamps, Carrie Wu, Zhong Ji Cai, Marie-Helene Lesiege, Myriam Assal, Timothee De Toldi, Nikita Lina.
A series of explorations use a variety of representation and imaging technologies such as film, photography, 3D scanning and digital simulations in order to reimagine and remodel reality – crafting a vision for the film center.
Students are prompted to take an ornamental condition in the neighborhood of Parc-Extension and re-imagine it as a facade system, exploring the idea of an expressive and communicative architectural interface. Material choice comes before the design of this assemblage, hence becoming a generative design element. Through the production of repeated architectural drawings, the studio experiments with different formal systems and gradually introduces the notion of scale to those explorations. Key words such as affect, articulation, emotive response, façade, screen, atmosphere, ornament, pattern, porosity, materiality, material experiment, skin, light, media, envelope, signal, repetition, emerge.
Mediation between the proposed intervention and the public space that surrounds it are questioned and explored. How does the façade of the Center for the Moving Image speak to its adjacent community? What does it communicate? Which morphological traits or ornamental qualities does it refer to? Produced through an obsessive elemental study – a physical, inspiring element identified in Parc-Extension – the design of the elevations of the Center defends a contextual insertion. As former cultural receptacle of emotions and energies, the now erased Greek Orthodox church Koimisis Tis Theotokou (or “where the virgins rests”) emerges as desirable site for the Playtime studio.
The students spend a lot of time in Parc-Extension in the first weeks of the course to fully immerse themselves in its ambiance. Observations must be qualitative: emotional responses, primary impressions and intuitions are encouraged. Attention is given to local materials, signs, symbols, colors, typologies, which are methodically documented through photographs, visualization software and drawings. In parallel with this on-site investigation, a research of significant historical and contemporary precedents unfolds.
Student project an “augmented” vision of the future building. They compose a hypercollage showcasing a conceptual image of the exterior appearance of their building, dealing with ideas of mass, transparency, light, openings, implantation, accessibility, entrances, connection to surroundings, verticality, horizontality, scale, articulation, rhythm, repetition and material qualities.
The last phase of the studio proposes to use the lessons learned in previous exercises to establish an individual strategy for spatial organization. Members of the studio are pushed to produce plans, sections and elevations of the envisioned design. Throughout the following weeks, they work on translating their design vision into comprehensive architectural drawing. Intensive image production is used as a design method to discuss intentions and spatial configuration before trying to resolve it through technical representation. Evocative drawings become a key element for transmitting information and emotions.