Thesis by Tyson Stevens

Screen Architecture: a pseudo-documentary Tyson Stevens

Master of Architecture Thesis 2009 Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning University of Michigan

Screen Architecture: a pseudo-documentary Tyson Stevens

Submitted on April 29, 2009

Keith Mitnick, Faculty Advisor Craig Borum, Faculty Advisor Mike Ferguson, Thesis Committee Mick Kennedy, Thesis Committee Amy Kulper, Thesis Committee Malcolm McCullough, Thesis Committee Wes McGee, Thesis Committee Geoffrey Thun, Thesis Committee

Screen Architecture: a pseudo-documentary Introduction â&#x20AC;&#x153;Architecture is the grand, but eternally provisional frame of human meaning.â&#x20AC;? -Camille Paglia

The film screen is a stage that is used to depict and interpret cultures as they evolve over time. Each film embodies a particular cultural interpretation from a specific vantage point in the context of the near now. While each film differs greatly from the next, the screen has one unchanging quality, its blankness. Similarly, architecture only conveys the meaning that we impose upon it; it is inherently indifferent. Yet, architecture is often viewed as a pre-eminent societal agent. This chicken-egg relationship causes confusion as to our cultural authority and authenticity. This thesis is composed of two distinct aspects: the pretentious and the informative, each acting in simultaneous opposition and cooperation with the other. The purpose of this duality is not to confuse, but rather to clarify the architecture viz. to bring to realization the portions of the encounter that are assumed a priori rather than experienced first hand. The architecture then ceases to be a facilitator of predetermined expectations and becomes unpredictable. The apparatus for delivery is a simple yet effective system of projection devices that utilize the blankness of the building walls as a way to manipulate our perception of architectural and urban space. Screen Architecture: a pseudo-documentary seeks to find ways that architecture might provide a blank screen for emerging cultural and social paradigms while simultaneously breaking down those that it pretends to purport.

ceived through this visual interchange. The laborious journey from the city to the site amplifies preformulated expectations of the architectural experience as an escape from the ills of the urban environment, i.e. that the architecture functions as an efficient facilitator of fabricated reality and not a laboratory for perceptual discovery. This situation sets an appropriate stage for the architectures imminent deception. One cinematic example of this is Jeannot Szwarc’s classic film “Somewhere in Time.” Christopher Reeve takes the role of a struggling playwright who falls in love with the image of a historic actress. He conceives a plan to travel back in time to win the woman’s affection. The way he eventually accomplishes his goal is to use the context of the historic Grand Hotel as his stage, and then surrounds himself with artifacts from that period in order to convince himself he is in fact in Southern facade from downtown Cincinnati the past. He eventually succeeds in both traveling back in time and courting the young actress. Unfortunately, he accidentally removes a Plan coin from his suit pocket that was minted in the future, immediately removing his mind, and therefore his person, from the past that he had so thoroughly emerged himself in. Our subject is a blank, nondescript piece of architecture that looks south over the city of Cincinnati from Belleview Hill Park. This area of steep topography Our primary concern here is with human perception. Architecture is essentially separates the University of Cincinnati from the fragmented neighborhood of a tool by which human beings express and manipulate their experience of the Over the Rhine. The architecture is visible only on its south face, but can be environment. As with the hotel in “Somewhere in Time,” this architecture will seen from virtually anywhere in the valley below. This situation establishes a inevitably transport the user to a preformulated mental notion of the architecprecarious visual relationship between the architecture and the inhabitants of tural experience. We therefore need a “coin” or trigger to dispel distracting asthe city. sumptions. An exterior digital projection apparatus will be implemented to serve as this trigger. The building, on its face, has only one prospect, to provide a single privileged perspective view of the city. The visual relationship with the structure is predicated upon one point of intrigue; a large opening directed toward downtown Cincinnati. This opening acts as a sort of eye contact with the viewer and functions to both draw users to a particular point in the structure as well as to provoke a mental formulation of the view of the city at that point, prior to the moment of arrival. At some point this circumstance will culminate in the viewer succumbing to their intrigue and traversing the Cincinnati valley to act out the experience conPerceived plan view

View from below Belleview Hill, Cincinnati

is merely a staircase leading up to a covered platform. This method works for three main reasons. First, the perspective view of the stairs emitting from the projector is a close enough approximation to human perspective that the mind will not immediately detect the farce. Second, this method is still rare, and therefore unexpected. Third, the image of a staircase leading to the point of intrigue embodies a (sadly) congenial understanding of how architecture ought to be simply what it is and nothing more. On this last point Bernard Tschumi makes a poignant insight saying: By focusing on itself, architecture has entered the unavoidable paradox that is more present in space than anywhere else: the impossibility of questioning the nature of space and at the same time experiencing a spatial praxis. Rear view entering the park from the north

The orientation of the architecture within the site is established in such a way as to provide only two points of approach. The southern approach is the view from the city and has already been discussed. The northern approach is the point of entry. At this point, the building is masked with a digital projection approximating what one might desire from the architecture, i.e. that the architecture will facilitate the expected view of the city efficiently and without resistance. Digital projection as an illusion of space is a very simple yet effective way to awaken the viewer out of “autopilot” and into the here and now. The projection is convincing enough to make someone think for a moment that the structure

This statement is resonant of the “either-or” vs. “both-and” architecture as put forth by Robert Venturi. Is architecture merely one-dimensional, or is it a statement in the context of a question? By using these projection techniques there exists both a unique spatial experience as well as a device for questioning that experience in real time. Our challenge is now to make architecture, which is believed to be something based in reality, take on aspects of cinema, something that is believed to be representational. If successful, what does this imply about the nature of architectural representation and abstraction?

Perceived sectional relationship to downtown

Section

Now that the true motives of the architecture have been exposed to a degree, there must be a compelling motive to substantiate the farce. Just as there is a prominent visual relationship between the proposed architecture and the greater city of Cincinnati, the interior function of the architecture will be to question the relationship between the architecture and the city below. The superficial promise of the structure is nothing more than a perceived experiential abstraction of the urban environment. It is akin to projecting a contrived image onto a screen, editing out the less glamorous aspects of city life and aggrandizing more aesthetically congenial ones. Consider this abstraction as a cross-section of experience created by the architecture itself, privileging certain aspects of the city and editing out others. In this case, the architectural manifestation of the city is privileged while the more intricate, pedestrian scale occurrences are left to the imagination. This predicament reinforces the tendency of the mind to fill in the blanks of what our eyes are incapable of seeing. The programmatic goal of the architecture will therefore be to discourage this tendency. As with the initial approach, the architecture’s interior apparatus for challenging abstract conceptions of the city is a series of projections on the buildings blank walls. There are many reasons why video projections are appropriate for this purpose, suffice it to say that of the many representational mediums, there is nothing more “now” than video. The fidelity between the mind’s conception of reality and its conception of cinematic representation is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the ability of so-called “conventional architecture” to convince the mind of its pre-eminence, creating a barrier to experiential reinterpretation. This is not to say that conventional architecture cannot call into question perception of space, rather that it tends not to. The challenge will be to convince the user that our visual perception can be manipulated as easily as the projection — that the architecture is imposing itself on the individual. There are two primary objectives of each projection. First, the rectangular dimension of the projection (4:3 Visualizing architectural abstraction 1

Visualizing architectural abstraction 2

Section facing north Plan level 3

Plan level 2

or 16:9 if you prefer) must be removed. This will be accomplished by the configuration of the buildings interior walls and partitions. The whole purpose of the design of the architecture is to house the projections in the most convincing manner possible. Second, the projected image must represent something familiar in the city and yet be manipulated in such a way as to question its fidelity with its corresponding memory. This can be done in countless filmic methods that will (and should) change over time, just as the perception of the architecture will likewise change. As culture and society progress, so must the content that is in question. The initial methods utilized include, but are not limited to: transparency overlay, tilt shift and time lapse techniques. In contrast to the architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s superficial and straightforward exterior, its interior is designed in such a way as to maximize the time between entering the building and arriving at the point of intrigue, namely the upper pavilion. This linear logic allows for many distinct projection axis with corresponding points of transition as the user progresses through the structure. The goal is to maximize projection space while down playing transitional zones. The interior projections in cooperation with the linear spatial logic of the plan provide a means to disorient the user during the journey to the observatory. Ideally, the user will become more aware of the visual abstraction of the city as he/she advances through the structure. The building seems to become transparent, subordinate to the projected views out into the city, but they will also contradict ideas of proximity and scale that the mind will inevitably try to establish, enforcing the representational aspect of the experience. Upon arrival to the observatory the projection dissipates leaving the individual to ponder the view he/she ultimately came to acquire. This scene will probably

Plan level 1

remind you of the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy “Pay No attention to That Man Behind the Curtain!” The jig is up and there’s no going back. There’s no possible way the view of the city will look the same. Each sequence of the program is set in place to subvert the view the building appears designed to give you. An example of this is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. The iconic view of this house is a perspective image accentuating the cantilevers of the house over a small waterfall from across the stream. The interesting aspect of this predicament is that by all practical measures, the view is impossible to acquire by its many visitors. Yet, this view is the sole point of familiarity for many of them. Although the journey to this house is more pleasant than our journey through Over the Rhine, it must seem misleading to the 120,000 annual visitors that they are cheated out of the view they have come to see. Having said that, the visitors surely leave the house with a much better idea of what occupying and living in the house must have been like. It is very doubtful that the owners sat in a tree across the stream to enjoy their home each day. A house is for living, the picture is merely a way to persuade one to take notice. Our object has been to challenge one’s expectation of architecture and by extension the urban environment. The premise being that our perception masks the way we tend to interpret the environment. This is not to say that there needs to be moral judgments placed upon our perceptions, rather that identifying our specific perceptual biases allows us to assimilate more information with which to become more aware of the world in which we live. “Life is a banquet and most poor fools are starving to death!” -Mame Dennis (Auntie Mame, 1958) Axonometric cross-sections

myself. It’s like the picture that I had contrived in my head became more and more complete as the years went by. The world is strange like that, it has the capacity to give you exactly what you want with little or no resistance. Being an architect is a good example of what I’m talking about. I’m the vehicle for my clients’ fantasies. They tell me what they want and I deliver it. First in a representational medium like a drawing or a model, then in building form. In some ways I don’t even distinguish between the two since they are essentially the same. At the end of the day they are both just ways to reassure the clients that they are getting what they had already envisioned. I sometimes feel like I’m getting paid to be a mind-reader! I hope you enjoy the little keep-sakes that I included with the letter. I’m not sure if you remember, but you actually took these pictures with my old Polaroid camera when you were young. That day may not have been of any consequence to you, but it really opened my eyes to your talent for photography. Even at that young age you were able to use the camera to capture that experience exactly the way I remember it. The funny thing is that you probably don’t Perspective Eli, Your mother and I haven’t heard from you for a while, so I thought that I would write you a letter. I know it must seem like an old-fashioned thing to do, but there’s something about putting pen to paper that makes me more aware of what I’m saying and why. Besides, there’s a good chance the mere shock of the medium will provoke a response from you, which in and of itself would vindicate the attempt. I’ve been thinking a lot about you since you left. It reminded me of when I started carving my own path in the world and the challenges that situation presented. I’ve had a pretty clear picture of what I wanted my life to look like since I was very young. Architects are like that I suppose. They all talk about wanting to be an architect since they were children, much like you wanted to be a professional athlete when you were younger. It’s always surprised me how closely I followed my childish fantasy, but even more so that the life I now have so closely resembles the life I had planned for

even remember that day very well, if at all, but I bet the pictures bring it all flooding back! It’s the day we went to the observatory next to the university. It’s one of the strangest buildings I had ever seen and I didn’t particularly like it, but you were very intrigued by it. I spent most of the walk up trying to edit our derelict surroundings out of my mind, but you seemed oblivious to our predicament, just holding my camera and taking pictures intently. I recall there being more pictures than the few here, but this is all I could find, so I hope they will suffice. I like to look back on our experiences together now that we’re apart. That’s normal I suppose. It’s in human nature to take things for granted when we have them, and then covet them when they’re taken from us. I remember thinking that my mother was a bit dramatic when I went out on my own, but this experience has made me reconsider that judgment. Don’t get me wrong, I think what you’re doing is great. You’ve really made something of yourself and I’m very proud of you. I also can’t blame you for wanting to get out of Cincy. I know the Midwest leaves much to be desired, especially compared to your beautiful San Francisco, but making sense of our lives is a little more difficult now that you’re not around. Well, I won’t drag on. I hope you will keep me and your mother apprised of what you are doing and how things are going. We’ve been talking about coming to visit you in the summer. We miss you and have never been to San Francisco, but I can see the city in my mind so clearly and can’t wait to match that picture with the real thing. I bet we could take some nice shots from the Golden Gate Bridge, how about it? Take Care. Love, Dad ps. I saw the postcard in a shop downtown and thought you might like it. Show those west-coasters what a Midwest city looks like!

Dad, It was great to hear from you. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been in touch, but things have been busy with the new job and everything. I know you don’t like to hear excuses, and I shouldn’t make any, but I hope this letter will help you forget what a bad son I’ve been the past few months. I guess you just have this idea that your parents are always there and take it for granted.

never lived in this part of the country before and so most things come as a surprise to me. I suppose the only expectation that I had when I came here was that my life would be different. Having said that, I wonder if I will inevitably fall into the same mind-set as the locals at some point. The mind really does that on its own. I remember taking drivers ed. and being taught what blind spots were. I couldn’t believe it. My mind automatically filled in what it couldn’t see. I wonder how many other things that my mind fills in without my knowledge.

Things here are good. It’s also been quite an ordeal adjusting to my new surroundings, but I’ve taken quite a liking to the city and all it has to offer. It’s especially interesting that I seem to see the city differently than most of the people here. I think it’s partly because I’m looking at it with new eyes. I’ve

I have to admit that I laughed when I saw those pictures. I took the ones you couldn’t find with me when I moved here and I look at them from time to time. I came across them a few years ago in an old shoe box in the garage. When I rifle through old stuff, I do it mostly to relive some experience that I had in the

past. I really enjoyed that day we spent together and so I held onto the pictures as a way to record and revisit it later. Some people keep journals for that kind of thing, but it made more sense for me to use something neutral and objective like the camera, something that I didn’t think could lie to me. I believed that for a long time. While I was going through the pictures it occurred to me that the camera wasn’t doing what I intended it to do. I thought it would be a neutral record of our day together, rather it was a record of how I had interpreted that experience. I immediately tried to recall what I was thinking when I took each of those pictures. I set them out on my bed and tried to reassemble the memories. It was a lost cause from the start, the eyes and the mind that had formed those pictures was long gone, but there was one thing that I

did recall quite clearly. If you remember, the building was blank, but they would project things onto it and make it look like something it wasn’t. At first glance it looked like a staircase leading up to the observatory, but then the projection cut out and I was like, “huh?” “Why would someone do that?” It’s almost like I’d awoken from a dream. Nothing really looked the same any more. I had to rely somewhat on the pictures to piece the rest of our day together. The inside of the building was an interesting montage of projections of the city, manipulated to look slightly unreal. The images didn’t resonate within me at that time since I didn’t know the city that well, but now they really spark something in me having lived here for many more years. I went back to the building hoping to get more of the experience back. They were still projecting images

onto the building, but the inside was very different. The images and techniques have all changed; still the same subject matter, but viewed with a slightly different lens. It was a great experience, but by the time I got to the upper pavilion I didn’t really care any more. That view of the city seemed more manipulated and contrived than the projected images that I’d just been exposed to. It’s like my mental picture of the city didn’t really match up with the one in front of me anymore.

tures with this letter so you can do the same if you like. Maybe when you come up with Mom we can talk about it.

I left the other pictures behind because for me they were part and parcel with the pavilion, that space between asleep and awake that you don’t quite know what to do with. Looking back on it, that judgment may have been a little rash. I mean, maybe there’s something in those pictures that I haven’t explored yet, so I’ll take another look and see what happens. I included my half of the pic-

Love, Eli

Make sure and give Mom my love. I know she thought I was more than a little fool-hearty coming out here on my own, but I hope she will understand. Sometimes you just have to test things out regardless of the outcome. I’ve always thought having a little uncertainty is healthy. I’ll give you a call when I can.

ps. I found a copy of this old home movie with the pictures, did you make that or did I?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRoMTPwKagI

Postscript

The thesis presentation provoked an informative and meaningful discussion of both the content of the work as well as my chosen approach to the subject matter. This approach did however produce mixed feelings about attention (or the lack thereof) given to the more conventional conversation prevalent within academia. Specifically, there was confusion as to the projection apparatus within the architecture. I had intentionally de-emphasized that aspect of the project because I felt that it was a distraction to the greater dialogue that I wished to provoke through the work. One juror agreed with me in a round about way implying that the “how” in architectural dialogue often replaces the “what.” A rewarding part of the conversation was in watching the jury attempt to identify what aspects of the film were editorialized. One juror commented on the church bells heard in the background and had assumed that it was inserted to the scene after the fact, when in reality it was the actual sounds of the space in question. This brought forth another aspect of the project that I had not considered, that the representation of the thesis itself calls into question issues of experiential reality and abstraction. There was a great deal spoken about the implications pursuant to the research of this thesis. It was suggested that there were important questions posed in the work without a proverbial “way out” to consider. One observation was that identifying areas of experiential neglect could be considered more appropriately a point of departure rather than an end in and of itself. While I sympathize with that criticism, I feel that the perceptual realization is a “way out” in a manner of speaking; that this realization provides a new basis for which, not only to

theorize, but to implement and interact with the built environment. Identifying specifically what the â&#x20AC;&#x153;end gameâ&#x20AC;? would be in such a situation seemed very prescriptive and contrary to the central premise of the thesis. Interestingly, the early formation of the thesis topic was very solution driven. I had a specific interest in the practice of Urban Design and wished to propose a thesis that would address and give solutions to those problems as I saw them. During the development of my ideas I found that making moral judgments on broad issues of urbanism was a slippery slope and not particularly useful to my development as a student of architecture. Rather, I found a way to investigate the relationship between architecture and the city in the context of an emerging representational medium that I intend to pursue throughout my career.

One aspect of the project that I would have liked to explore further is the relationship between memory and architectural affect. As stated in the introduction, there is a chicken-egg relationship between architecture and culture. Memory is the key primer in this scenario. I tried to explore this concept somewhat in composing the letter between a father and son recalling the same experience. This seemed a fitting scenario because, just as there is a chicken-egg relationship between architecture and society, there is also such a relationship between a father and a son. The father attempts to mold his son in a certain way, but inevitably is molded himself by the process of parenting and the individuality of the child. Similarly, we as architects design and build cities that have some founding in the past, but inevitably shape our future. The extent to which we realize this relationship is a measure of our worth as architects.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. Thompson, Kristin. Film Art. 2004. New York, NY. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. 1972. New York, NY. Clarke, David. The Cinematic City. 1997. London, UK. Feldman, Allen. Faux Documentary and the Memory of Realism. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 100, No. 2. Jun., 1998. pp. 494-502. Jacobs, Stephen. The Wrong House. 2007. Rotterdam, Netherlands Lynch, Kevin. Image of the City. 1960. Cambridge, MA. Mitnick, Keith. Artificial Light: A Narrative Inquiry into the Nature of Abstraction, Immediacy, and Other Architectural Fictions. 2008. New York, NY. Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye. 1990. London, UK. Shiel, Mark. Fitzmaurice, Tony. Cinema and the City. 2001. Oxford, UK. Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture of Disjunction. 1996. Cambridge, MA. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 1965. New York. Whyte, William. City. 1988. New York, NY.

Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), dir. Stanley Kubrick Ashes of Time (1994), dir. Kar Wai Wong Big Fish (2003), dir. Tim Burton Dark City (1998), dir. Alex Proyas Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), dir. Michel Gondry Koyaanisqatsi (1982), dir. Godfrey Reggio Memento (2000), dir. Christopher Nolan Pi (1998), dir. Darren Aronofsky Rash么mon (1950), dir. Akira Kurosawa Rear Window (1954), dir. Alfred Hitchcock Somewhere in Time (1980), dir. Jeannot Szwarc Synecdoche, New York (2008), dir. Charlie Kaufman The Third Man (1949), dir. Carol Reed

Acknowledgements

To Keith for filling the blankness in my project. To Craig for being awesome. To Cynthia for the late nights. To Ryan for putting up with me. To friends and family.