ANIMAtion Studio

Form, space, rhythm, order, symmetry, balance, repetition, proportion and scale are few from a long checklist of principles that, if followed carefully by the designer, will result in "beautiful" architecture, or so I was told. However, what exactly is "beautiful"? In his book "The beautiful necessity" (1910, p.34) Claude Fayette Bragdon suggests that "Beauty is the name we give to truth we cannot understand". This statement implies that there is a hidden quality within each building, or even within each space, a quality that we can sense but cannot make sense of, a quality very similar to having a soul.

The soul seems to linger on the threshold that divides two opposite worlds, it is always in-between. Between the dream and the awake, between the physical and the imaginary, between the conscious and the subconscious and between the real and the unreal.

In this thesis, the "real" world consists of an animation studio (the program), the studio's staff and visitors, the selected site located in Alexandria, and it is bound by the building methods, materials and codes. The "unreal" world consists of four fictional characters that, assumingly, emerged from my subconscious and who live in a fictional dimension that overlaps ours.   The different encounters within the "real" world and within the "unreal" world, and also the interactions between the "real" and the "unreal" worlds are translated into an architectural language as an attempt to investigate the soul.