2A Design Studio: The Function of Affect - Durational Space In Architecture And Cinema

Our ambition in this studio is that you might be nudged into a dance with architecture; an architecture of your imagination and making, and that we too, as passers-by, might be nudged in this dance. We all need mediators as Gilles Deleuze asserts, something to set us in motion and, at the outset of this studio it is cinema that will be deployed to put us in orbit. Film mobilizes temporal and spatial modes of perception as does architecture but whereas film cannot but be conceived in time, architecture rarely fully engages the effects of temporal conception in its making.

Consider for a moment the still image of the Atlas of Cinematic Affects. Set its images in motion and they become analogs for the thinking-feeling we experience in an intensive and affective encounter with an architecture that moves us. Their dynamic forces, mobile trajectories and material qualities, which only appear over time, will initiate the first exercise of the studio.

These shape-shifting cinematic formations moving through our inner and outer worlds will be harnessed and transformed in the making of an architectural assemblage. Through design we will come to know these sequences intimately, and discover what they can do; their variable speeds and slowness, hardness and softness, coldness or heat, gravity or weightlessness and the atmosphere that the rhythmic interplay between them might create for a living subject. As you advance through the exercises you will begin to conceive and perceive architecture dynamically, in time, and as living substance in relational interplay with your sensing.

The initiation of subsequent and related projects in the Studio will follow a similar course, developing through intense investigations in physical modeling, drawing, and a range of analogue and digital media best suited to distilling the poetic core of fundamental questions emerging from the studio and from the architectural passions and predilections of each of the participants. Our ambition is to liberate architecture from the shackles of convention while opening new territories of the formal and material imagination. This will be accomplished with a cross-disciplinary focus, drawing not only on the means and methods of architecture and the plastic arts, but on the temporal arts of music and dance with a primary 4 focus on cinema, for cinema is the art form closest to Architecture.