The overlapped realities of built architecture and human action raise questions that concern the separation of the built from the lived, experience from representation, the imaginary from the everyday. In this thesis, considering movement in time as the agent of interpreting place is a proposition for a performative understanding of architecture that aims at expanding its feld of practice by blurring the boundaries between objectsubject and space-time. Through the twentieth century, movement has been explored in urban and land-art practices, yet the role it can play in rethinking building has been understated. When movement has been the focus of architectural design, such as in the Beaux-Arts marche and Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade, it has been limited to expressing the aspirations of the architect. My thesis expands existing understandings of the role of movement in architecture through the study of one building: Casa Malaparte by the writer Curzio Malaparte, mistakenly attributed to architect Adalberto Libera. Through on-site and archival research, I expand the literature on the house’s authorship and discuss Malaparte’s architectural practice as an intentional blurring of living and building. Malaparte considered his house the best portrait of himself and called it ‘House Like Me’. I discuss the house as a building portrait that embraces movement beyond modernism’s insistence on functionality and effciency. I argue that the house is a ‘stage of life’, creating ‘living pictures’ of its inhabitant. My study is a synthesis of textual and design research. I introduce the concept of the architect-performer, an active subject attuned to movement, who interweaves knowledge acquired from direct place experiences with insight from historical, theoretical and design research. Working between analysis and design, I use the moving image as a performative tool to explore a flmic documentation that is able to render intimate and temporal conditions of place that otherwise remain unspoken.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:747156 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Iacovou, Popi |
| Publisher | University College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10040478/ |
Page generated in 0.0138 seconds