dis.PLAY - Center for the Art of Moving Images. A Film Center for Washington, D.C.

Abstract

This thesis explores how a displayed image and architecture interact together. This manifesto is analogically explored using parts of the human body such as the eyeballs as a structural analysis for the buildings with a projection of the cornea, the pupil, the retina, the optic nerves and the brain. This analysis follows a sequential order of capturing light, transcribing light into image, and displaying such image onto a screen. Both, the image and architecture are created parallel to each other respectively when conceiving an architectural idea in order to develop the idea into a building and then perceiving the architecture from such building.

These steps are a cinematic approach using a video camera to record an experience of movement through the journey of a metro ride. This video is one of the tools used to edit an urban tissue of downtown Washington, D.C. The project becomes a Center for the Art of Moving Images exposing vectors of movements through its architecture. The building is manifested in a three-dimensional design where the site provides a sunken plaza 60 ft below street level perceived as a new floor in the city. The underground metro station transitions to the street surface through the use of this plaza in a very harmonious way. The result is a visual depth parallel to the perspectives perceived in movies where you see beyond the surface of the screen and in this case, beyond the surface of the city.