PROFESSOR

Christian Unverzagt

STUDIO THEME

The past two centuries have been marked by rapid change not within a fixed and stable world, but within a world transformable, and transformed. From industrialization to the information age, regional conflicts to world-wars, global trade to global warming, the world has been re-shaped in ways both deliberate and unintentional.

The studio will design a center for experimental and arthouse films on the edge of Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown. We’ll work to understand the circumstances which have led us to this time, and speculate on the role of architecture to work with and shed-light on these conditions in a confined, semi-urban site. To do so will require optimism, imagination, pragmatism, and diligence.

The studio will explore the relationship between interiority, exteriority, and interstitiality through verbal declarations and visual delineations. While we may be more familiar with the conventions of a movie-going experience, do we fully understand the spatial implications, or its benefits? Perhaps we are within a broader in-between moment, so how might one develop an architecture that gets us through these intersticial times?

We will use the book as a pedagogical tool by which to study precedent and develop design strategies, through a process of cataloguing the work in process. The book will be not be understood as a post-design record, but rather a means by which to develop prompts initiated by iterative engagement between spatial and organizational thinking and the form of the book.