The design problem for this studio is a cinema/screening room for the CU College of Arts and Media. The history of Cinema as a building type and a cultural institution will be the point of departure for our design investigations. 

The moving picture was, at its inception, a radical and transforming technology that dramatically altered our traditional perceptions of space and time. For the first time in human experience, it allowed us to collapse and fold space and time virtually. It allowed us to be ‘where’ we are not and ‘when’ we are not.  It brought the past to the present and elsewhere here. In the final count, however, the moving picture was merely the harbinger of the type of radical continuity and simultaneity of space and time experiences that we have come to take so much for granted. The rapid pace of innovation and technological advances in the intervening century and a half has brought us to the point of virtually folding space and time, at will, with a small device in the palm of our hand.

Despite the radical and profoundly altered experience of space and time (the essential and defining elements of architecture), the architecture designed to house the moving picture has been from inception and remains today essentially static and traditional in spatial and experiential terms. This housing and what is housed have been and remain divergent. 

We will probe the history of the cinema as a building type, identifying its formal continuities and discontinuities in time. We will try to account for the stylistic discontinuities in relation to an ever-shifting cultural/technological context. We will try to account for the continuities in functional distribution and spatial organization as the attributes of specific institutional demands and requirements whose purpose is the promotion and sustenance of a set of lasting cultural presuppositions about representation, reproduction, and mimesis.

A critical re-evaluation of these presuppositions will, in turn, mark the parameters of a new context for design. A context within which the link between the formal/architectural properties of the building type and the institutional/cultural presuppositions in question could neither be acknowledged nor ignored, neither reinforced nor discarded. A context within which there could be no intuitive and/or positive re-formulation of the building type in affirmation of the link, but only a critical de-formulation of the type in recognition of the link.

The pedagogical intent of this design exercise is twofold. The goal is to foster and develop the type of analytical skills essential to deciphering the complex relationship between architecture and the culture industry it perpetually serves, i.e., the skills essential to the formation and evaluation of design ideas and programs. It is also the goal of this exercise to promote a conscious reevaluation of all the subconscious assumptions regarding spatial organization, the relationship of parts to whole, the inside to the outside, the particulars of volume and mass, solid and void, path and place, structure and material, ornamentation, proportion, scale, and others. This is with the intention of designing an environment that is, in the final count, all too familiar and yet all too alien, one that is neither a copy nor strictly an original. An environment, in other words that speaks silently of the designer's ability to willfully manipulate the language of architecture as opposed to faithfully re-produce its various speech acts.

We will proceed according to the following tentative schedule:

• Building/Institutional analysis    August 21- September 6
• Spatial studies and explorations reflecting the above analysis    September 6 - 20
• Statement of intent    September 25
• Site/Context analysis  September 25 - October 2
• Programmatic response to all of the above    October 2 - 9
• Design(ed) reflections from the structural to the ornamental    October 9 - 20
• Presentation proposal    November 15
• Final Presentation    December 6
• Portfolio    December 15

You are encouraged to develop a specific program for your Screening Room with the following limitations:

• The project should not exceed 30,000 sq. ft.
• Provisions should be made for: 

• An auditorium with a seating capacity of no more than 250
• Lobby Space
• Office and work spaces for staff
• Public facilities
• Storage and mechanical spaces
• Additional facilities to consider may include:
• Coffee shop
• Library
• Classrooms
• Store

The final presentation will be treated as a design problem in its own right. You are encouraged to explore the limits of the conventions that pertain to architectural presentation and thereby design a presentation that effectively communicates the issues grappled with throughout the term. The final presentation should include, as a point of departure, the conventional plan and perspectival drawings as well as a detailed Model.

As an extension of the final presentation, you are required to submit a portfolio of your work by December 15. Your portfolio should document your ideas, your progress through the term, and the final project. The portfolio should be submitted via OneDrive as a PDF document for high-resolution print in a folder that contains all the related images in JPG format (maximum quality).

Much of the studio time in the first half of the term will be devoted to group discussions and collective review and analysis of individual work. We will devote more time to individual reviews and discussions in the second half of the term.

Your performance in class will be evaluated based on active participation in group discussions and reviews, vigorous exploration of the issues at hand, as well as analytical rigor and willful manipulation of the language of architecture as opposed to formal reiteration in the absence of a thorough comprehension of all the incumbent issues. The ultimate criterion is the successful completion and presentation of a project that realizes a coherent and rigorous thesis based on a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the assigned problem. For a detailed description of the studio outcomes and evaluative criteria, please see the Studio Outcomes document.

Required Reading

Question Set 1

Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Penguin Books, New York, 1974
Oysters, Smoked Salmon, and Stilton Cheese, pp. 15-33

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Hill and Wang, New York, 2012
Myth Today, pp.215-258

Judith Butler, The Judith Butler Reader, Sara Salih Ed. Blackwell, Malden, 2004
Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion, pp. 103-115

Amir H. Ameri, The Architecture of the Illusive Distance, Ashgate Publications, Burlington, 2015
Introduction, pp.1-9

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York 1978.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, pp. 217-252

Sigmund Freud, Studies in Parapsychology, Collier Books, New York, 1977
The Uncanny, pp. 19-60

Amir H. Ameri, The Architecture of the Illusive Distance, Ashgate Publications, Burlington, 2015
The Architecture of the Illusive Distance, pp.137-184

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema

Recommended Reading

Edwin Heathcote, Cinema Builders, Wiley-Academy, London, 2001

Chris Van Uffelen, Cinema Architecture, Braun Publishing, Salenstein, 2009

Reference Reading

André Bazin, What is cinema? vol. I, Berkeley, University of California Press 1967

André Bazin, What is cinema? vol. II, Berkeley, University of California Press 1971

Catherine Belsey, Culture and the real: theorizing cultural criticism, New York, Routledge, 2005.

Q. David Bowers, Nickelodeon Theatres And Their Music, Vestal, NY, Vestal Press, 1986.

Ben Brewster, Theatre to cinema : stage pictorialism and the early feature film, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Linda Chase, Hollywood on main street : the movie house paintings of Davis Cone, Woodstock, Overlook Press, 1988.

Ian Christie, The last machine : early cinema and the birth of the modern world, London, BBC Educational Developments, 1994.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I; Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II; Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986-

Andrew Dudley, The image in dispute : art and cinema in the age of photography, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1997.

Giovanna Franci, A journey through American art deco: architecture, design, and cinema in the twenties and thirties, Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1997.

James Forsher, The community of cinema: how cinema and spectacle transformed the American downtown, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003.

Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Richard W. Haines, The moviegoing experience, 1968-2001, Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, 2003.

Ben M. Hall, The best remaining seats; the story of the golden age of the movie palace, New York, C. N. Potter, 1961

Colin Harding, In the kingdom of shadows : a companion to early Cinema, Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Ina Rae Hark, ed., Exhibition, the film reader, New York: Routledge, 2002

Jan-Christopher Horak, Making images move : photographers and avant-garde cinema, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Mark Jancovich, The place of the audience: cultural geographies of film consumption, London, British Film Institute, 2003.

Michael D. Kinerk, Popcorn palaces: the Art Deco movie theatre paintings of Davis Cone, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

John Margolies, Ticket to paradise: American movie theaters and how we had fun, Boston: Little, Brown, 1991

Judith Mayne, Cinema and spectatorship, New York, Routledge, 1993.

Christian Metz, The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982

Rachel O Moore, Savage theory : cinema as modern magic, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

David Naylor, Great American movie theaters, Washington, D.C., Preservation Press, 1987.

David Parkinson, History of film, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1996

François Penz and Maureen Thomas, ed., Cinema & architecture, London, British Film Institute, 1997.

Ave Pildas, Movie palaces, New York, Crown Publishers, 1980.

Michael Putnam, Silent screens: the decline and transformation of the American movie theater, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, apparatus, ideology: a film theory reader, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.

Dennis Sharp, The picture palace, and other buildings for the movies (Excursions into architecture), New York, H. Evelyn, 1969

Terry Smith, Impossible presence : surface and screen in the photogenic era, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001

Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994

Joseph M. Valerio, Movie palaces: renaissance and reuse, New York, Academy for Educational Development, 1982.

Gregory Waller, ed., Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition New York, Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2001

Barbara Wilinsky, Sure seaters: the emergence of art house cinema, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Peter Wollen, Signs and meaning in the cinema, London, BFI Publishing, 1998.

Special journal issues devoted to movie theaters, exhibition, and moviegoing:

Brickbuilder 23 (February 1914) on movie theaters and terra cotta architecture

Architectural Forum 42 (June 1925) on the design of contemporary theaters

Architectural Record 104 (November 1948) on new theater architecture

Velvet Light Trap 25(1990)011 exhibition/ conditions of reception

Film History 6 (1994) on the history of film exhibition

Iris 1 7 (1994) on movie spectators and audiences