An aspiring architect’s ability to interpret, discuss and understand architectural space begins in first year studio. What is Architecture? What is beyond the scope of Architecture? Early studio projects force students to question the common notion that architecture is the backstage and that what's backstage is architecture. This project looks at the architecture of the urban environment through a map of motion and sensorial experiences, begging the question “where do fact and fiction merge?”

A two person group project, my partner and I drove around our suburban town looking for an interesting urban space in which to make our movie. We ended up sneaking into an abandoned multi-story office building construction site known to be a haven for spray painters and drifters. We tensely climbed up to the middle floors where there would most likely be more natural light to help with our movie. The uppers floor felt less dangerous than the lower dregs of the building so we decided to start filming there. Once we started filming the tension left us. Looking back, we figured that the more active we became, the more associated with that place we were, and that made the place less intimidating than it originally was to us. In the film presented we ramped up from a still shot of the empty space to heavy-loaded sequences of my partner and me walking through the space. We also plugged in audio during the movie to emphasize coherency or distortion depending on what was happening in the video. The end result was an eerie-fun short film that explored all the motifs of the assignment given. While no particular argument was made by my group, the end work acted as more of a catalog of activity which confronted the audience with all the same questions my group had entering the project. What makes an environment urban? When is a space more dominant than the figures that occupy it? What causes a space to lose its dominance over those who occupy it? Can we identify the characteristics that are at play between a space and its occupants that facilitate the figure/background relationship? And finally, is emotion a controllable quality in Architecture? These questions were not intended to be answered by the completion of the assignment but more so meant to be added to our internal design arsenal as my classmates and I approach future projects.

I need to figure out to load the video to this site so for now I’ll post some frames from the movie.