Memory [Architecture] Film: Four Cinematic Events in the City

Abstract

Cities involve several systems that work together as a network of urban relationships. These systems are in balance, and they work as a whole that articulates urban life.

But what makes a city memorable and special are its events: those magical situations where the uniformity of the experience stops and something unique arise.

Those are the moments where our memory is deeply engraved by a particular situation that will come back in our dreams and imaginative processes as an agent image.

Four urban events — a space for film edition and writing, an urban stage, a footage archive and park, and a projection space- whose locations have been determined by a Cartesian game dictated by the Plan of Washington DC; and one common discipline, Film, will be the main focus of this research and a way of understanding the relations among Memory and its spaces, Architecture and Film in the City.

Each event will respond to the particularities of its context by understanding first the sites and their relation with the city. These sites will be located in the four quadrants of Washington DC- NE, SE, SW and NW- and they will be consider as different communities that, by keeping their own idiosyncrasy, create one city.

The question of urban scale as well as the concept of detail as part of an architectural cosmology will be present throughout the process of the thesis by the alternation of micro and macro analysis of each stage of the research. The question of scale will be present as well when comparing the four projects with their differences in shape and size.

Characterization and monstrosity as architectural concepts will be incorporated into the project too, by understanding the role of Architecture in the city and what it wants to show or "monstrare" to its inhabitants.