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Spitalfields Film School: Transgression > Architecture < Narrative

Part 2 Project 2012
Kirsty Pesticcio
 University of the West of England | UK
Bound within a marginalised site, the Truman Brewery in London is tensioned between commercial infringement from the west and the cultural richness of the east. The film school discourages the westerly intrusion and strata’s itself vertically upon a small footprint. It seeks to amplify the authenticity of existing transgressive acts and capitalise on this to encourage a blurred margin between spatio-political realms such as private and public
events.

The presence of film becomes a catalyst to fully immerse captives in a play with ‘rules’ and ‘limits’ to flux the state of mind between the real and unreal and the role of spectator or spectated.

Transgression as method and theory becomes key to the proposal. To transgress is to play and teeter on the limit of laws transitioning between the expected and unexpected. Building programme, societal norms of school functionality and expectation of space as ‘rules’ are challenged. To be on balance between the two poles of constraint and unlimitedness moving back and forth is where the richness of architecture will ultimately lie.

A questioning of boundaries and limits evolves into a hybridization of architectural programmes and spatial hierarchies. There is tumult in the whole, but the aim has been to reason with a level of rigour needed for the film school to function, as well as developing spaces that explode the ephemeral qualities of the event into an illusionary eroticism.

To explore transition and immersion the school is designed to work as a creation of layer (solid/veiled/superimposed). They develop a voyeuristic and inspiring discovery of scenes through cinematic transitions {dissolve-cut-focus} that translate powerfully through to its structural composition.

The building can be experienced as having three identifiable strands that evoke the passing between layers of polarized worlds; backstage, transition, theatre/stage. Each of these layered spaces beholds transgressive qualities of their own.

Beyond its core structure and programme quite literally disintegrate from stable to unstable through a method of unstitching. This fracturing of the tectonic evokes the qualities of cinematic immersion. The spectacle is constantly shifting, becoming blurred and confused as the architecture falls apart and dissipates into its immediate surrounding.


Tutor(s)
Mr Jonathan Mosley
2012
Located at the centre is >architecture< contingent on and situated within the apparatus- transgression&narrative - both of these terms will form the theoretical and ideological approaches to the film school
The urban environment captures, through filmic moments of constraint & release, snap shots of the city. The architecture & city inhabitants are the apparatus for constructing the scene
A review of La Jete resulted in the architectural representation of key characters as isolated mass that sits dominant to its context. This disseminated into the key character spaces of the school; cinema & production studios
Flanked and bounded by the tension between commercial suffocation and idealistic freedom its success as carnivalesque is through the new loci. It is situated upon a margin and so within a seemingly transgressive state, in limbo
First day at the film school, key scenes of arrival & initial movements through space
Moving between the classroom & the library, highlighting the change of materials, visual permeability & light qualities of the spatial experience
The filmic technique of the ‘dynamic cut’ polarises the scenes. The cut is present in the architecture enabling a ‘double shot’ to develop, enriching the experience of transitions between spaces
Key views of the building upon entering the Truman Brewery site & the change in the spatial experience within the school
Ground Floor Plan
Programs are by definition ‘unstable’, they have long ceased to be determinate. With this in mind the practice has sought to be playful and expressive with the so-called ‘rules’ and ‘limits’ that are imposed
The quality of light with its varied depth, contrast and composition drive the underlying experiential qualities of the film school, where the results are cinematic
The composition of the facade dilutes the proposed massing with the sky and adjacent building reflecting upon the glass
The lecture steps are a transgressionally led space that moulds and adapts to the changing needs of a film school
The steps become a vital mixing ground, a social milieu within the school that encourages the cross fertilisation of spontaneous student interaction
The structural development in the approach has seen the need for the structure to `disintegrate' and break down mass. The structural strategy is therefore using a mixture of both concrete {Primary Structure} and steel {Secondary Structure}
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