Collapsing the Veil Between the Worlds: Inhabiting the Cinematic Effect

Abstract

As industrial aesthetics within the built environment become obsolete in a post-industrial setting, the quality of inhabitable spaces within Wellington’s industrial buildings declines, and numerous opportunities to reuse this rich built fabric dissipate. This is due to the lack of consideration given to their heritage value in New Zealand currently. Moving towards the typology’s demise, a fundamental layer of Wellington’s built history is irreversibly lost and notions of architectural permanence come under question when the architectural merit inside and out is undervalued and classed as redundant. This is one such contemporary example highlighting the need to regenerate an inhabitable projection of reality within these spaces to challenge the current stigma attached to the interiority value and maintain these built documents of history.

Filmic space, created in moving-image media, offers a range of atmospheric generation techniques that do not conform to limitations of reality due to the cinematographic interpretation of real space and temporal engagement depicted within these spaces. When applied to the built environment, this method allows concepts of illusion to infiltrate into atmospheric production. In response, this provides alternatives for expressing interiority and changes preconceptions of existing buildings that current architectural representational media can often lack. Contemporary design methods of making and representing space are well-grounded within digital media, including animation production. Due to this, methods of spatial generation and depiction are increasingly becoming more automatic.

Through the creation and use of a framework defining filmic space, and a cinematic vision method to apply this framework derived from theoretical and applied filmography studies, this design-led research thesis seeks to suggest whether cinematic motions can be an effective spatial generator, in this circumstance, for the interior adaptive reuse and protection of this industrial aesthetic abundance.

The framework for the generation of physical filmic space is embodied within the methodology of cinematic vision consisting of time and memory, the blurring of reality with illusion and exploring the relationship between the observer versus the observed. Which can effectively mediate the synthesis of the historically rich industrial fabric of the Kilbirne bus depot and new programming: a permanent Weta Museum and public film hub.

This thesis argues that using a filmic space framework as a spatial method can produce interior architectural interventions that respect the historic integrity of a building and simultaneously create a new identity that seeks to challenge current de facto ttitudes held against industrial sites. It also proposes to harvest cinematic techniques to infiltrate into the creation of interior filmic spaces’ through the removal of the boundary, the screen, mediating represented and inhabitable space to generate this framework. Whilst in the process, challenging current cinematic limitations in architectural processes and representation. The thesis seeks to achieve this by manifesting filmic techniques into a usable architectural ‘filmic space’ framework, and utilising the framework throughout the entire design process form research to final design. It also seeks to achieve this through the dentification and curation of fundamental characteristic qualities currently embodied within the site through a filmic site analysis process to weave the historic narrative into the proposed design and continue the developing history of the key building.

Overall the design led research suggests that a filmic spatial method is an effective atmospheric generative tool to successfully revive degenerative interior spaces allowing the appropriation of this built form typology and prevention of loss.