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Island Hopping, Film Festival and Censorship HQ

Part 1 Project 2000
Angeliki Anagnostopoulou
London Metropolitan University | UK
A carpark in SoHo Manhattan, is the site for a Film Festival HQ. The proposal for a 9 x 60m shaft site provides a 70-seater movie theatre and 3 private viewing screens all arranged around an elevated mesh foyer platform.

Natural light, plotted across the site and artificial light, spilling from cracks in the movie theatre walls and across the mesh platform, is allowed to inhabit the site. The sensation of the threshold of street to foyer, foyer to theatre and theatre to bar is a physical and spatial experience accentuated by changes in level and highlighted by changing the changing intensity of light. The local vernacular of fire escape stairways is adopted for all connecting routes.

The proposal evolves from an investigation into ’ islands’ territories, which develops an analogy between the ‘island’ and a church building: a space with a threshold separation for the outside, where natural light is used as architectural device.

A 3-dimensional painting, using the iconography of the triptych, represents the threshold between the island and the surroundings.

Angeliki Anagnostopoulou


ISLAND HOPPING
Studio 4 investigated the Metropolitan cities of London and New York where due to cultural diversity, historical development and economy, many ‘islands’ coexist. The geography of the city or geology of the land does not necessarily fix these islands territories, their existence can be transitory, operating for brief moment in the 24-hour lives of the city.

Angeliki Anagnostopoulou identified the threshold of light and shadow s to define her ‘island’. In a London church she intricately recorded this landscape of light falling across walls and floors. Her analysis developed into a 3-dimensional triptych focusing on the threshold of interior and exterior, as well as the threshold of light.

An interstitial site in New York’s SoHo district was similarly recorded. She proposed a Film Censorship HQ building slung in the cavity. Due to its form and location, the passage of daylight across the massive flanking walls was particularly apparent. Angeliki drew analogies from the church studies and proposed to leak light from the five cinemas into the surrounding space.

Angeliki’s delicate choreography of light as an architectural tool enforces a sense of fragility and impermanence to her proposal. The tongue-in-cheek use of vernacular stairways offers contextual integrity

2000
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