Split

INTAR-23ST-02 Time & Motion Screen Technology and the Reproduction of Modern Architectural Heritage Composer: Zewei Feng Instructor: Eduardo Duarte Duration: 8 Weeks Site: Monsanto House of the Future, Disneyland LA

Monsanto house was built in the 1950s as an attraction site in Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. The project was built as a concept, a prototype, cooperated by three institutions: the Monsanto company, Disney Imagineering, and MIT. It is a project with high contemporality, where plastic material was just invented after WWII. The great potentials this newborn material reveals triggered considerable expectation and enthusiasm at that time. Under such an attitude, the Monsanto house was designed to demonstrate the versatility of modern plastics as a house of the future.

However, an avant-garde concept often possesses strong duality. The Monsanto house was born in a temporal historical context to uncover the possible future, while it is enslaved to its circumscribed contextuality, which doomed its final deconstruction.

The project is designated to investigate principles of architectural reproduction in the context of cinematic techniques of montage, superimposition, and juxtaposition based on comprehensive research of this historical heritage site. Then based on the achievement above, the project will be led to the final phase, where I Invest how a virtual reproduction becomes projected onto an architectural screen. How a reproduction is more than a projection and more than the original version? The study of Monsato house derives from three major subjects: its cooporative design, chronological evolution, and the comtemporary scopic boundary. Based on these attributes, a series of questions were raised: How did the purpose of time raised from cooperative institution achieve its form? How did the positioning confine its potential wtihin finite time span? How to break through its age boundary and make the conceptual and physical remainings of Monsanto house continuously live as an inspirational resource?