INSTITUTIONS
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCH 552 - FALL 2024COORDINATOR
Ana Morcillo PallarésPROFESSORS
Ana Morcillo Pallarés, McLain Clutter, Julia McMorrough, Steven Mankouche, Charlie O’Geen, Neal Robinson, Jonathan Rule, Christian UnverzagtThe Movie Theater program
The Institutions studio works to explore and communicate the opportunities for design for reality to be transcendent and visionary. Students are introduced to the basic concepts of life safety and accessibility, and how to treat these as integral considerations in design work that is inclusive and asks productive questions about social justice, equity, and who and what is represented in our institutions. The studio prioritizes the relationship between civic structures and the city, as well as capacity-building in the core competencies of building design.
This Fall 2024, the studio focuses on Movie Theaters. From the early nickelodeons to the opulent and transformative experience of movie palaces, from inexpensive drive-in theaters to tech cinerama domes, from dine-in theaters to luxury boutique cinemas… No matter how much the movie-going experience changes, one condition remains intact: it’s the one building that becomes completely invisible once you’re in it. You spend two hours in a darkened space, leaving your routine behind, while your head is full of the spaces you’ve inhabited on screen rather than in the physical realm.
Today, while the coronavirus pandemic has shuttered cinemas across the world, and in a digital era of avidly visual consumption, what can we still learn from the invention and emergence of the movie theater as an institution? How does its representational role mediate the fabulous kitsch, the extravagance and the ephemeral illusion? How can the movie theater experience be reimagined once again? And, what new possibilities might shape for itself in the immediate future?
PROJECTS
Anna Peterson - On Broadway
Riley Montgomery - ARGO CINEMA
UNPLUGGED STUDIO
The rising awareness of the effects of climate change calls for a response to a condition in which designers are increasingly compelled to transform built contexts and to address problems that had been confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or city planning. Building on the urgent need to contest today’s energy politics of containment by reconfiguring outdated aesthetic assumptions, the ‘Unplug from DTE Studio’ invites students to reflect on an environmental awareness of a new clean-energy institution.
Drawing on a hypothetical future when DTE will leave Ann Arbor, the studio will take advantage of the privileged location of the DTE’s historic property of Argo Substation next to the Argo Cascades - today a major recreational green area but a relic of an industrial past for the production of hydroelectric power on the Huron River. The studio will stimulate the persistence of the site’s past, through its electricity legacy to envision a typology intimately related to lighting performance such as a movie theater. An opportunity that will stress the physical, symbolic and environmental importance of using the existing. A framework, in which the students will design a movie theater that doesnt follow a trend of superfluous new construction but considers the uniqueness of reused materials and energy in a more economic way, extending the life of the structures, at the same time advocating for a climate justice future. In a capitalist-driven society, is there still room for the environment? Can we revert the legacy of the opulent movie palaces towards a more ambivalent and playful institution? Can we change our myopic vision of inclusion and sustainability?
STUDENT
Anna W. Peterson
PROFESSOR
Ana Morcillo Pallarés
Situated on a post-industrial site along the Huron River, the historic Argo Substation has been carefully transformed as an adaptive reuse project to function as Ann Arbor’s newest neighborhood cinema. Inspired by the substation’s heavy brick facade, I aim to explore the relationship between the existing stereotomic structure and the addition of a new, lighter tectonic framework.
Ann Arbor has two notable fixed-seating cinemas, the Michigan Theater and the State Theater. With the evolving media trends of today, the On Broadway theater offers flexible seating to accommodate various viewing types, such as immersive screenings and dynamic event spaces.
STUDENT
Riley Montgomery
PROFESSOR
Ana Morcillo Pallarés
“ARGO CINEMA” stimulates the site’s past, envisioning a cinema intimately related to lighting performance as a playful artificial landscape embracing the Argo Cascades. The proposal repositions the existing substation as a theatrical set of new pieces/fragments in the park. It is a continuation of the cascades’ stepping and a rerouting of the b2b trail, embedding the proposal in the existing context. An opportunity that stresses the physical, symbolic, and environmental importance of using the existing, ARGO CINEMA extends the life of the substation and at the same time advocates for a sustainable future.
PROJECTS
Mira Abdulla - Rarified
Erin Roberts - Screen - Tribune - Theater
Infrastructures of Imagination
What does it mean to call a movie theater an institution? Institutions are both material and conceptual; physical and abstract. Institutions emerge from the collective beliefs of a society and endure to steward the continuity of those beliefs. The movie theater? Movies are media, and our society’s contemporary media consumption habits trend anything but collective. Today, most of us engage media in echo chambers. We consume alone, in the basement, or nestled behind the digital veil of Iphone’s privacy mode. There, we seek out digital communities of consensus, reinforcing our political and social ideologies, and trolling those who do not share our views. But the movie theater was once the dominant spatial format for media consumption, and one in which media was consumed collectively, in a single space, while contending with one-another. Movie theaters were public media infrastructures — infrastructures of imagination. This studio section recovered the history of the movie theater as an institution. We looked back at visionary early theaters, proposals for experimental cinemas, and several pre-cinematic precedents for collective media consumption. Critically mining these precedents, students proposed contemporary movie theaters that disrupt current trends toward atomized media consumption, reasserting movie theaters as instruments of collective life.
STUDENT
Mira Abdulla
PROFESSOR
McLain Clutter
The Rarified! cinema draws inspiration from Raree show boxes - 19th-century furniture-like street objects that carried worlds. Named for their rarity, these novel, multisensory show-boxes captivated people worldwide, but have since faded into obscurity. Examining the rarities of our time, this cinema choreographs a sequential journey through oddly-scaled objects, satirically highlighting modern cinema’s extremes. This leads us to wonder: When did larger-than-life images and immersive soundscapes become so ordinary to us? How can architecture recapture the sense of wonder that once accompanied cinematic experiences? And, ultimately how can we begin to challenge norms that are deeply ingrained in our psyche?
STUDENT
Erin Roberts
PROFESSOR
McLain Clutter
Influenced by Gustav Klutsis’s 1922 constructivist agit-propaganda stands, Screen-Tribune-Theater works both formally and programmatically to build a collective consciousness by exposing various types of information across construction and media. Formal manipulations and translations of an original composition are indexed through material exposures and structural indicators. As the forms of the auditoriums are pulled apart, so too are key aspects of the films and crowds they host. Visuals, audio, conversations, and movements from within the theaters bleed or seep into the circulation spaces between them through openings, thicknesses, glass, and lighting to reveal shadows of cinema to those who pass through.
PROJECTS
Cory Hoffman - TRIAD
Frank Michel - Glowstone
TRILOGY: Trios, Triptychs and the Rule of 3s
In understanding the multitudes contained within cinema, architecture, and the design process, the TRILOGY studio explores the explicit and implicit possibilities of threeness. We find ourselves simultaneously at the beginning, middle, and end; we ask: what came before? where are we now? and what will happen next? The third time will always be a charm. Through three we get expansion or constraint, sequence or set, similarity or difference; with three we get more than the sum of the parts.
In architecture, we swim in the waters of what has already been (of the homage, the tribute, the style...). We never start from zero, and one thing always leads to another.
The TRILOGY studio looked to architectural and cinematic precedents, not only for what they can teach us about narrative, sound, and sight, or of the exigencies of program, site, and codes, but as the inspirations for a series of vibrant and cinematic architectural TRILOGIES that make thoughtful, bold, and novel proposals for movie theater designs.
As in any good film, our protagonists (i.e., architecture) have undergone dramatic journeys of self-discovery, and before the credits rolled, were re-defined through engaging with new characters (form, program, pattern), new ideas (color, access, drama), and the vanquishing of foes (imposters, defaults, and design villainy).
TRILOGY is the successor to SEQUELS (Fall 2023).
STUDENT
Cory Hoffman
PROFESSOR
Julia McMorrough
The movie theatre experience has always been more than just the film. Utilizing common THREES found in a persons life,
-Circle, Square, Triangle
-3x3 Photography Grid
-Red, Green, Blue (RGB)
This complex is able to cultivate THREE different experiences, which entices visitors to return for more. An orchastra centered theatre blends live music with the magic of motion picture, a planetarium introduces a learning aspect, and an outdoor projection allows a free alternative for families and students to enjoy.
Will TRIAD be your next third place?
STUDENT
Frank Michel
PROFESSOR
Julia McMorrough
The Glowstone Theater wraps visitors in an immersive experience, enclosed by a flowing skin that embraces a glowing glass tower rising from the ground so to create an enclosed environment shielding from outside light. Inspired by a layered diagonal and orthogonal grid, the design is built around sets of three—three unique paths for entry, transition, and arrival—allowing guests to shape their own journey seamlessly through the entry of the landscape, the transition into the building, and arrival at the three theaters. Light plays a central role, with direct, specular, and diffused illumination enhancing the space. Two theaters sit underground, while the third transforms the tower’s rooftop into a stargazing cinema, where audiences can recline beneath the night sky as films are projected overhead.