Positions

Graduate Thesis 2022 Provocations

Week 07 & 08

House in a Movie Screen

Koolhaas Houselife is a film project by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne portraying one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture - Maison à Bordeaux. The film lets the viewer enter into the house's daily intimacy through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building. My Uncle is a comedy directed by French New-Wave director Jacques Tati. Tati shows how the modern age affects and dramatically changes the way that people live. All the new technologies at that moment are incorporated in the scenes, were the interaction between this new concept of “modern spaces” and people is an element present in most of the movie.

Fig 1 Scene from the Koolhaas Houselife Movie Fig 2 A replica of Villa Arpel at the Cent Quatre in Paris Ref 1 Koolhaas Houselife. DVD. France, 2013. Ref 2 Mon Oncle. (My Uncle). Film. France: Dist. National Cinema Service, 1958.

Fig 1

Week 09

Film Studio as a Laboratoy for Architectural Speculations

The Hill House is one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's most significant works, built in 1902. The domestic masterpiece was, at the time, immensely innovative with its structure. Unfortunately, its unusual hybridization of tradition and invention in the construction of the building has led to some fundamental long-term problems of prolonged water damage that require a significant conservation project to help the house survive.

To preserve the house, a radical proposal of its restoration has been proposed by the British firm Carmody and Groarke. In addition, a fifteen-year-old extended plan for its preservation has brought to a suggestion of a large box, which protects the building from the weather. The walls of the box are covered with a stainless-steel chain-mail mesh, which allows the circulation of air and different entities like bees to maintain the ecosystems inside the box.

This particular project calls for an idea of a large film studio in which the building takes the main spotlight. This studio could potentially become a place of physical and digital speculation, where the building becomes a protagonist of a television show. The everchanging conditions, which could become highly constructed, could simulate environmental and cultural speculation. Potentially the building itself could become an object with human-like qualities, through which the audience could relate on many different scales of time and space .

The performance of the building and its inhabitants becomes a laboratory for new environmental imagery based on specific conditions and their reactions on a physical and digital layer.

Fig 1 Hill House Rennovation Ref 1 González, María Francisca. “The Hill House Box Museum / Carmody Groarke.” ArchDaily. ArchDaily, March 8, 2021. https:// www.archdaily.com/920640/the-hill-house- box-carmody-groarke. Ref 2 “The Giant Chainmail Box That Stops a House Dissolving.” YouTube. YouTube, February 7, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9XSzwbFCFtc.