BEAUTY MEMORY ENTROPY

MAKING AND VISUALIZING

 

Castaways In An Unfamiliar Home: This Is Not A Threshold

Jorge Rivera,  Carleton University

 

ABSTRACT

Mood and atmosphere played a significant role for Romanticism in the nineteenth century. Particularly in literature architecture was used to create a setting for stories that unfold and explore the emotional dimension of human endeavors. Meanwhile, since the eighteenth century, architectural theory was feeding on narrative to develop and explore characters and theories to understand the role of emotions in the art of building to engage the dweller’s soul.1

In some cases, the connection between fiction and architecture became so close that the building was at once a character, embodied the mood and expressed an atmosphere. Architecture presents itself as essential to create an emotional connection with the story, such is the case of The Fall of The House of Usher (1839), where the house is a twofold concept, representing both the building and the family. The house that holds the family’s memories falls into disrepair together with the family when a terrible crime as committed within its walls.

During the twentieth century, with the emergence of cinema as a major vehicle to tell stories, the affective framing of architecture as atmosphere, is effectively used in some cinematic stories to explore the cathartic role that place can play in the healing of wounds via collective memory by becoming the setting of unfolding rituals and plots. Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel (1962), shares with Poe’s narrative the use of architecture as a creature that holds within its walls a haunting force that emotionally involves characters and spectators in place and time, framing the emotional and psychological downfall of its inhabitants, dealing with memory and loss. In both the cinematic and literary medium, which are taken as cases of architectural representation, the place represented becomes emotionally engaging to us by effectively working with time and narrative.

 

1 See Nicholas Le Camus de Meziere’s The Genius of Architecture, or the Analogy of that Art with our Sensations, tr. D. Britt (Santa Monica, Cal.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992)

 

BIO

Jorge Rivera Gutierrez (Mexico City, 1980), is a Mexican architect who has practiced for ten years in the design-build field before recently starting his PhD at Carleton University.

He graduated from the Architectural Hitory and Theory masters program at McGill in 2007 and went back to Mexico to work with a few offices before opening up his own practice in Guadalajara. His office, Departamento de Arquitectura, has been primarily interested in developing a design-build process that works closely with clients, local craftsmen and architecture students. Recently, he ventured along his brothers in making short films, video documents and video installations. He debuted his first video installation at the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture, within the Mexican pavilion. He also taught design studio at ITESO University in Guadalajara.

He recently moved to Ottawa, where he started a PhD in architecture at Carleton University. His research interests lie in exploring the possibility of filmmaking as a tool to inform research and design in architecture, primarily from an atmospheric, emotional and narrative stand point.