CINEMA & MEDIA CENTER
Second Year Studio, Spring 2015
The prompt is a performance, art gallery, and media center, with a focus on its cinema. Located on a corner site in a burgeoning section of Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, this building is meant to make a visual statement for the arts and its unique program. Montage and sequential experience is emphasized.
The design plays with an Architecture of Fantasy, where many elements of the program and circulation provide moments of suspension, surprise, or novelty. The design of “speckled” skylights in the theater contribute to its surreal experience, as well as the conceptual proposal of plantlife grown on the theater floor, which has no seating, suspending the audience over a fantastical garden.
It also experiments with a vertically-arranged theater audience. Entering the theater from the first floor, a visitor is suddenly suspended, having entered the middle balcony level, and when the film starts, experiences the complete other world of the movie, untethered by the world outside the movie theater.
As part of the atmoshpere, scrims are integrated into the architecture: in the building facade and as flexible separators of internal program, creating a shadowy projection of movement on the other side. This experience creates a unique kind of transparancy and understanding of activities “on the other side of the wall,” and very much in the spirit of the cinema.
BEHIND THE SCRIM - This is a conceptual film I shot as supplemental material for the project. It conveys an atmospheric idea for the design, and could be considered a moving concept render. In the building design scrims function as spatial dividers and as a facade treatment. The translucent scrims create an interesting affect that conveys movement and activity from the other side, but not specific details. The scrims make the inhabitants themselves part of the cinematic experience, and make the atmosphere immersive.
ADDITIONAL CONTENT FROM PROJECT: (less shiny)
