DESIGN UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE:
ARCHITECTURE AS CAMERA, PEOPLE AS FILM

FilmSense is a design innovation project that disrupts how buildings evoke experience. This FilmSense museum architecture is designed to act like a camera that frames, moves, and filters the exterior world. Visitors to this museum become the film as they process what the building captures with their eyes, cognition, and memory. A window in this building is like a camera viewfinder that bridges the exterior with the interior in ways that are ever-changing. No longer does a window simply let in one view. Instead, it allows for a view to be set in motion, like a movie camera, as the building rotates and visitors navigate through the museum. For this reason, design emphasis is placed on the framed views that the architectural form creates, rather than on an architectural form that gets window views placed as an afterthought. Consequently, this innovative FilmSense design project rethinks human experience as an immersive real-world film ― evolving architectural moments from the ordinary into the unforgettable.

INVITING NATURE INSIDE:
RE-FRAMING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE

This visionary FilmSense design project advances and expands upon the use of metaphor as an opportunity to positively disrupt the way architectural experience is designed. Instead of building an architecture to house function that dictates form, this project uses function derived from metaphor to innovate occupant experience through form. In other words, as a building is designed to function like a camera, the resulting occupant experience evokes new ways for occupants to perceive themselves, the building, and the exterior context through the architectural form. This FilmSense experience also depends on a play of “film-like” perspective alignments that guide occupant orientation and views in an ever-changing narrative progression as the architecture rotates to follow the sun’s movement across the sky. Such innovative bridging between a person and the natural environment, through architecture, serves to reconnect and deepen humanity’s relationship with the planet – as it is sensorially felt through the architecture that re-presents nature anew.

IMPACTING FUTURE GENERATIONS:
CAPTURING DEFINING MOMENTS IN REAL-TIME

What makes this FilmSense design project an important contribution for humanity’s future for generations to come? When a building is designed as a camera that frames human experience, one consciously asks: What do we treasure? What do we forget? What do we hope for? What brings us joy? We are the film capturing these moments, awakening to the environmental lens that nurtures our own perception. Just imagine a world where built environments re-present the surrounding contextual world often taken for granted – to not only shape human experience, but to also frame the formation of memories that people take action upon. FilmSense presents a visionary roadmap for built environments to awaken humanity to the multitude of beautiful, ever-changing, and sometimes challenging dimensions that make up our world. The FilmSense project shows how, just as a camera, an architecture can capture a moment that can impact generations to come.

ARCHITECTURE THAT PHOTOGRAPHS EXPERIENCE:
FRAME ROOM, PANORAMA ROOM, ROTATIONAL ALIGNMENT ATRIUM

FilmSense: An Architecture that Photographs Experience is designed with a Frame Room and a Panorama Room that rotate with the movement of the sun as dynamically positioned by the Rotational Alignment Atrium. Within the glass-enclosed Frame Room an individual can experience incredible moments with nature as this Frame Room points one directly to the sunrise and sunset, while also capturing all the changing gradations of light and nature in-between. Within the Panorama Room a group of people can experience a real-time “filmstrip in motion” as this rotating room’s windows capture light and frame an everchanging landscape. Thus, the Frame Room provides people with a complete immersion, while the Panorama Room re-presents the surrounding contextual environment by capturing its dynamics in ways never experienced before. With each architectural rotation, building occupants are able experience each unique day as “architecturally photographed” into their memory. In other words, with each visit to this architecture, contextual surroundings which would otherwise be taken for granted are celebrated through defining moments of delight, amazement, and deep understanding.

FROM MEMORY TO ACTION:
EVOLVING THE ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

The FilmSense visionary conceptual design project is truly innovative because it makes tangible a vision for how architecture can uplift human experience in completely new ways. By shifting the paradigm of what a building is, and what it can become, architectural design can be created to unite humanity with the natural contextual surroundings that we are so often separated from by buildings. While we still need architecture to protect and shelter, it must also serve to connect us with the beautiful dynamics of the planet’s natural environment. After all, this will lead humanity to deepen our relationship with nature – to better protect it, harmonize with it, and form defining moments that shape our role in how it evolves for future generations.

CREDITS:

CONCEPT DESIGN, SOUND DESIGN, AND FILM PRODUCTION:

Maria Lorena Lehman — MLL ATELIER

MEDIA TOOLS:

Adobe Photoshop, SketchUp, Lumion Pro, Davinci Resolve 

MUSICAL COMPOSITION:

David Gonzalez