PROFESSOR

Peter Halquist

STUDIO THEME

Participants in the Hyper-Space studio rejected the premises of universal design, instead responding to the notion that there are grounds for architectural exploration that lay well beyond conventional design approaches towards accommodation.

This studio attempted to design from the perspective of specific disabilities and was predicated on the extreme diversity inherent in spatial and disabled spatial experience.

Paralleling the sci-fi concept of hyperspace, this studio looked beyond three-dimensional space, speculating on the roles that human perception, experience, and social interaction might play in re-imagining the typology of the movie theatre.

Participants in this studio looked to concepts and scholarship from disability theory, neurodiversity studies, and psychological fields for inspiration. Participants also examined more familiar experiential qualities of the movie theatre such as the smell of buttered popcorn and the enveloping effects of a film’s soundtrack.

Throughout the semester, the Hyper-Space Studio foregrounded social and experiential aspects of the moviegoing experience. If the cinematic experience takes an audience beyond the physical spaces of the theatre, into the extraordinary world of film, why can’t the left behind spaces of the cinema aim to be similarly transcendent?