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Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Union City Drive-In, Union City," 1993

"Architecture exists in a different reality from our everyday life and pursuits. The quality of architecture does not lie in the sense of reality that it expresses, but in its capacity for awakening our imagination."Christian Norberg Schultz

Unit 11 is interested in exploring the capacity of architecture as both a sensual and material experience, and as a dynamic framework of occupancy and use.

la Cité de la Muette, in Drancy, Paris, is a housing estate and former second world war deportation camp. Built as an Ideal Garden City it is now a torn social and economic system. Students were asked to consider how through an architectural proposition this system could reboot and regenerate.

Unit 11 use film, photography, animation and motion graphics to generate, develop and represent architectural and spatial concepts. These time-based techniques allow us to explore experiential and narrative forms of spatial inquiry. We are interested in exploring the ways in which architectural space and film space combine, collide, inform and reconfigure one another. The unit's aim is to shift ideas away from the static and towards dynamics and the processes of use within spatial experience. We seek temporal, narrative architectures that use space, time, sound and materiality to communicate a relationship of human interaction.

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Aperture

For the initial project, students built a scaled room or container for capturing light and sound, that then travelled to Paris by train and was used to navigate, survey and explore the sites for the following propositional projects.

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top: multiple pinhole image of Jardin du Luxembourg by Chris Chapman, above: pinhole polaroids of la Muette by Chrissy Watkins

Exposure

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Using the Aperture project as a seed, generator or component, students proposed an arts space for the Jardin du Luxembourg. This small building and public space proposal allowed ideas of narrative space and its representation to be explored. Particular influences for the project were the short film La Jetée by Chris Marker and the work of Jean Prouvé.
'Hoodies', the proposal by Ash Seaborne won 3rd prize in the Arts Council and RIBA London ideas competition for an Arts Space of the Future.
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Projection

The main project brief was for a complex building and public space proposal sited in La Muette, that responded to the needs of the site and its inhabitants. Students considered the physical, social and historical site of the courtyard, buildings and neighbourhood, but also the long-term occupancy, future adaptation and use of the proposals.

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Projection project images from top: Ash Seaborne, Tasios Konopisopoulos, Tom Dollard, Antonios Zafeiropoulos

images below from AVA Showcase 2008 (from top: exhibition view, sketch and Exposure view by Shota Uehara, Projection model photogram by Necati Un)