Free Range 2011

'Untitled' the film

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'I am a kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I have created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until now when I also created it.'(Dziga Vertov)

Many designers and architects nowadays mainly design for the pleasure of the eye, making buildings that have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity. But to understand, to situate ourselves into the space, we need to feel it, to feel its atmosphere and have our emotions echoed back to us. But, ofcourse, every person feels himself differently in the same space.

In my project ‘Untitled’ I am bringing you to the exploration of the site (Canterbury West station) from the way I saw it. This film has its own atmosphere, very different from what the station is like. I am exploring the site as a space of compression, speed, loud noises and crowd that I had to face. I am looking at three phobias: xenophobia, claustrophobia and phonophobia. And now my site is my film. 

This film creates the fusion of space and time, where architecture participates in the very emotion of the film, and as Anthony Vidler said, it does not surround anymore, but enters the experience as present. The audience can only experience it when I decide so, as I am the creator of this site. It became a spatial proposal when I have started to draw into the video with my diagrams, that show the spatial tension of phobias between the site, its inhabitants and the operator. The two-dimensionality of the picture is being extended in depth by the fourth dimension-time.

Untitled Teaser

I am still trying to upload the final variant of the film somewhere, so let's pray it will work out soon and my blog will have a beautiful copy of the actual film. And for now, here is the screenshot of it, little 'taster'. 

Synopsis : 4. Contemplation

When something looks like structure, its being legitimized by this ‘looking like’, and not necessary by the structure itself. So the image and look is always dictated by an icon; the design process produces something called architec- ture that always look like something which was characterised by its genre. In other words, the design is dictated by its function. But the architecture provides only one level of information. In this case, the machinic process is not so much a condition of providing a clarity of information, a yes/no set of answers, or a condition of form versus space, presence versus absence, but a process whereby the idea of spacing will be revealed to lie within the form- ing, where presence lies within absence, and private with public. (Peter Eisenmann)

The design process that I called’ Contemplation’ illus- trates this idea. There is no more private or public, it is all formed into one living organism, called and formed by nature. There is no more differences between form and function, now it is all about adopting to the environment.

The designer is out of the control in design; the creator is out of control on his creation. After the landscape ab- sorbed the architecture, human would no longer be in con- trol of nature. Nature is a creator that provides a shelter to those, who are looking for one. Drawing above shows the scene in the architecture block’s foyer, where materials and underground springs have creates cave-like ledge that can provide a shelter to inhabitants.

Synopsis : 3. Apocalypse

For this project i have been exploring the geological map of Canterbury to see how it may effect the the site (Canterbury School of Architecture). After 'digging deep' into the soils, i have picked up the concept of the Apocalypse, where nature 'takes over' the human habitats. In my case though i have done it so that the soils take over the building, so the closer the building element comes to the earth, the more it is of its original form, for ex. brick becomes sandstone, concrete- limestone, glass-sand, etc.

The boundaries between architecture and landscape are dissolved, so the CSA building is now part of the terrain map of Canterbury. It is occupied with the nature, and only few elements upstairs remind of the human culture that has been there years ago.

Synopsis : 2. Awakening

In a design stage ‘Awakening’, the function was dictating the form. This process can also be called ‘becoming’, where the attempt to produce an object that is no longer complicit with its previous terms of embodiment. The process deals with becoming a state of an ob- ject, in this case where the object has to have a function of a sleeping machine, but even then this becoming does not differentiate between forming and spacing: both of them are equivalent processes of becoming. Even though the function dictates the form, the shape has more of landscape than architectural qualities. This is a start of becoming one with nature.

Synopsis : 1. Self-Understanding

The earliest design process shows how nature of an object becomes alive. There is no human influence on a machiene, but it shows the abilities of its own. It starts to understand its surrounding and its own place in it, first by looking around. And this moment has been captured on this scene. The machiene, just like a newborn child, shows one of the main natural qualities od all live creatures: curiosity.