Traversing the Extremities of Time: The NZ Film Archive

Abstract

The extremities of time relates explicitly to film as films are all about capturing time, documenting time, storing time, preserving time and engaging with time. The extremities of the present time are represented by the past and the future. Films have a unique way of connecting to the viewer by drawing them into the setting of the film on a subconscious level. This statement is related to technology, time travel and the archiving of film. Analogies of technology informs my design intervention in the film archive by exploring how the past can shape the future, how the future can preserve the integrity of the past and how we move between these two characters. Architecture is fashioned by technology which bombards us with stimuli everyday. And everywhere we go we are exposed to technology on some level, so how do we re-claim harmony and humanize architecture in this rapidly developing digitally enhanced information age? Technology affects every aspect of the designer’s work flow, so as designers for the future we should embrace technology and exploit its qualities to generate innovative 3-dimensional ideas, which can be easily conceived and generate architectural form. By using the analogy of a hard drive to inform the holistic intervention this helps to compose the spatial relationships and generate form and function of the holistic tectonic. The three main characters of the intervention being the concentric circles of the library where information is stored permanently, the theatre which projects information temporarily and the vertical circulation which acts as a threshold and a mediator between the past time and the future time. The still images library acts as a counter balance between the moving images theatre. The threshold of the vertical circulation between the conscious and sub-conscious acts as a datum line and a transition zone where the inhabitant is in a state of flux between still and moving, conscious and sub-conscious, light and shadow, permanent and temporary.