PFA SPRING 2011, CED: UC BERKELEY
ARCH 101: ADVANCED DESIGN STUDIO TUTOR: KYLE STEINFELD
The project takes the form of a film archive set across the entire Marin headlands. The archive is a buried retaining wall made up of hermetically sealed capsules, accessible at certain points within the landscape by large stone towers. These buried walls form a network of paths across the Marin headlands, linking in with existing hiking trails and accessway. The buried wall is created by a series of earth removal and burial machines, archival printers which organise the multiple wall systems based on the archival content. As the walls grow, access and projection towers are constructed along its length, acting as markers at the scale of the landscape, and as points of access to the archived content. As the walls form paths and then networks over time, the towers allow both walkers and technicians means of accessing the archival content. Each tower is outfitted with an interface that allows walkers to access content at a personal level, but the towers are also geared to providing for mass consumption. As the patterns of pilgrimage and event emerge over time, the towers become sites of ritual in the consumption buried films. The architecture becomes an event - a mediation between the direct, phenomenal experience of something, and the the replayable, rewatchable, anywhere, on-demand nature of watching film in the 21st century. This project was also part of a studio focused on the act of drawing as a means of guiding the process of architectural design. Instead of typical plans, sections and elevations, we were asked to construct dense, atmospheric, perspectival ‘money shots’ to convey our ideas. The project mediates between architecture’s relationship with vastly different timescales and forms of occupation, specifically in the overlap between extreme permanence, and extreme temporariness. This buried film-wall shows that a tension between the permanent and the ephemeral can play a role in understanding architecture’s relationship with extreme, geological timescales, and architecture’s relationship with the immediacy of the event. Section through buried film wall.