SHONKY PROJECTOR
Advanced Design 2
︎︎︎PROJECT ATTEMPTED IN 2021
UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF:
MICHAEL MCCABE
Site: Redpaths Furniture, New Lynn.
Film: Chungking Express directed by Wong Kar-Wai.
Architects have been making films since its invention. Moving images speak to the architect’s interest in light, movement, temporality, sequence and perception. Rather than produce seamless simulations offered by renderings or orthographic drawings, the project seeks to engage with the shonky. It considers the moments of slippage caused by this translation of architecture into film and back as a productive space of incompleteness, speculation and poetry. The project looks to harness the polemic and performative qualities of film (Chungking Express) thus disrupt the normative processes of the architects’. The project engages critically with the medium of moving images to reimagine the site.
The design research initiated through the analysation of a selected film. Filmic and cinematic qualities were extracted and critically evaluated. In this context, the emotive qualities in which the director inserts throughout Chungking Express through cinematography and colour were carefully examined. Thus, prompted the proposition of how (or if) these qualities and techniques can be inserted into an architectural format. If directors can evoke and produce emotive responses through a cinematic lens with the viewers; how can architects do so too but with space?