Introdution to Project. Narrative film begings as soon as this ends.
We are submerged in the most gloriously voluptuous and dizzyingly complex aesthetic culture that man’s abilities in artifice has ever been able to achieve. Whether you turn on your television, your computer, your phone or your ipod, there is at a moment’s notice the hypnotic and dazzling copiousness of our furiously paced visual media; and venture into any department store or shopping centre, and with your credit card as the only barrier, there are as many obsessively design objects of desirous need as it is realistically possible to ever purchase before the season is out.
This cycle of sensual richness in which we swim has replaced placid contentment, or righteous rebellion with a perpetual cycle of momentary satisfactions, a constant series of miniscule goals which are forever being fulfilled by the unending flow of novelty coming towards us. And because of the need to produce perpetual satisfaction, all this spectacular form flies past us at ever-increasing rates, to the point where it can become difficult to remember what music video, designer or restaurant one was ‘into’ even a few months prior; and at the scale of buildings things pass-by just as quickly, and we are left either with singular artefacts from bygone fashions that remain as curious time-travellers, or we simply see the built fabric around us being constantly replaced as it approaches redundancy almost as soon as it is built.
In a necessary contrast to this flux stand the great institutions which care for our temporal and spiritual needs. The state and the church provide the anchor in the flow, the secure reference point from which citizens can safely navigate through the vertiginous and exciting waters around. These institutions stand for absolutes like truth, love, justice and permanence, and their buildings echo with the same resolutions. Churches have evolved to become lifeboat-like escapes from the wonderful and fierce culture around them. They stand in yoga-like suspension implying a return to essentials, a rediscovery of continuity and the possibility of permanence.
Fascinating as these churches are as great anchored artefacts, it seems that what would be far more interesting would be to have one of these aloof life-boats raise its anchor, set sail into the choppy waters, and trace its own course through the blinding colours of the culture around it. What would happen as an institution which treasures perpetuity above all else has to navigate through, and contend with a world that fulfils people’s desires in the blink of an eye while creating new ones in the very next moment? What kind of an architecture might happen when the desire for permanence and the impulse to change converge on the same blank-slate site?
