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Film Factory

Part 2 Project 2009
Lucy Inder
University of the West of England | UK
The factory is the act of transforming an empty shell into a place full of life, generosity and freedom, in offering free access to a structured living program for the direct emulsion between people and space. Here, there is no place for spectators but only actors: the public, technicians, architecture and objects are on stage along with the 'official film makers', past and present, architecture and the city, actors and audience all intermingling.

The building is set within two infill sites on the Mile End Road in London, with the existing walls and the traces of the past acting as the starting narrative of the buildings. The existing facilities of the road provide an essential backbone to the area which supports its inhabitants, and as such the fabric of the existing narrative should become weaved into the founding narrative of the structure.

In essence, the factory will offer a kit of parts, enabling enclosures, gangways, screens and services to be created for individual or social needs, with previous incarnations marked through the knocks, bangs and scrapes on each component of the new plan. The architectural proposal could at one point consist of workshop spaces, a bar/café, all-in-one units, editorial suites, stage sets, residential units, cinema screens and exhibition spaces. At another point in its life it may house all or none of the above.
Programmed from the formation of a series of rule books, the organizational necessities of each possible space were used to devise four conditions from which each possible use could be stripped to its barest requirements. At times the suggestion of use may be ambiguous while at others the marks of use from past occupational behaviour will begin to program the building to its inhabitants own patterns of use.
Play is allowed a productive dimension here and "if you ever need to run a wire from one room to the next you simply cut a hole in the wall".



Lucy Inder has developed an outstanding architectural proposal within her Film Factory that demonstrates excellence in design and an ambitious conceptual investigation. The project was set within a Unit entitled Film /Architecture / Narrative that examined the relationships between these three concerns and promoted an approach towards design that considered architecture as occupied, experiential space. Film was used as a device that both infiltrated the design process and the representation of projects.

The site area was based on the arterial road running from Aldgate to Mile End. Lucy’s proposal is set within two infill sites either side of Whitechapel Road.

From the outset Lucy created a sophisticated brief that challenged the typology of a film school. The institution of the school opens its organizational structure and its architecture to the city. The school becomes a system allowing for adaptation by its occupants, responding to desire within the everyday and maintaining flexibility for many possible futures. Some of the poetry of the scheme resides in this balance between the building as an efficient, pragmatic system and the celebration of the traces of occupation and use. The building is intended to become a register of its multiple configurations as partitions scrape on floors and inhabitants lean on rails.

The designer’s fascination in traces continues within the beautiful drawings of the scheme that display a grittiness that speaks of the production process and reflects the conceptual approach of the proposal. The drawings have a sense of the momentary, becoming a snapshot of the building in one of many states.

Lucy succeeds in relation to the Unit agenda in understanding various cinematic techniques and creating an environment that is a catalyst for film-making. Her imagination with regard to framing, points of view, and incidences of potential tableaux produces a project both intellectually stimulating as a drawn scheme and potentially as a built reality, hugely enjoyable to experience.

Tutor(s)
Mr Jonathan Mosley
Rachel Sara
2009
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