T.06
SCREEN TIME

Type:
M Arch Thesis

Advisor:
Rania Ghosn

Readers:
Enrique Walker, Hans Tursack

Media:
Single Channel Digital Video, consisting of:
Altered found film, video and sound, computer generated animations, newspaper clippings, sterographs, patent drawings, postcards, documentation of a historical architectural competition

Awards:
Special Mention, The Media Architecture Biennale

Exhibitions:
Unbounded: Transmedia Storytelling @ MIT, 2019-2021
The Media Architecture Biennale, 2020

Publications:
Thresholds 50: Before | After

SCREEN TIME is a short film about a buidling with no boundary. The project was researched and fabricated under the isolated conditions of Covid 19, without the traditional tools of architectural production: there was no workshop, no library, and no studio. Not even a site to visit, since out-of-state travel was authorized only for emergency reasons. The screen per force became studio, library, workshop, and site. I decided early on to embrace this situation, and directed my research toward perhaps the most imaged building in the world, a build-ing whose presence is entirely screened: the 1905 New York Times Tower of Times Square.

The film presents the Times Tower as an actor in an extended media apparatus. It is structured by six media devices each of which serves as both a lens for the tower’s history and a vehicle of speculation. In the context of an entirely upended space of architectural production, the film pursues a notion of architecture without its cardinal directions - vaporised, expanded, evacuated into new formats. It is my intention that the film constitute an outer limit of the building - an edge of architecture’s expanded envelope.