Arch 401
Prof. Jimenez
Academy for the Study and Production of Films, Fall 2010

Ni Zhan
Choreographing Space

Films are often about the passage of time. If we equate movie characters with architectural elements, the change in a person’s personality and manner could be translated into the temporality and growth of architectural surface and space. The project (Academy for the Study and Production of Films) choreographs spaces through layering of materials, spaces and creation of friction between boundaries and surfaces, thus achieving a spontaneous yet coherent narrative. The programs were at first generically striated by a stream of walls into different spaces. These spaces then start to morph and interchange when responding to specific site, surface and material conditions.

The circular periphery, defined by a soft and hard interplay of concrete, glass and landscape surfaces, engages with the urban setting ambivalently and mysteriously. Being drawn into the introverted space, the flaneur takes on a completely different experience as he or she enters the Academy, and immediately senses the formal, material and spatial friction created through the sharp contrast of interior and exterior articulation. Sartre, in “For a Theater of Situations”, wrote that “the most moving thing the theater can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life.” The project, like a narrative film, provides a set of situations (locality and events) that help map out the pyschogeography of individual visitors through which the physical environment is amplified.