Modular Pavilion

One of my passions through the years has been the art of film. I used to go to movies growing up and we would see two or three films in a row on the weekends. When I went to school to become an architect I was amazed to find that there were classes on the correlation of film-making and architecture. It was a great experience and I really began to understand architecture in a whole new way thereafter. One of the questions continually raised in the class was the orientation of the projection. This project by Prechteck brought back some of the memories I had from that class. I think it's obvious to most people why a building is oriented vertically. It's practical, it's cheap, it seems the natural way to build buildings - and all of those assertions are correct. But just because a particular orientation is congenial doesn't necessarily mean it's mandatory. If you tilt the film projector on its side, then you will have a significantly different experience than if it is projected on a vertical wall or standard tv set. But not any movie can be viewed that way, you have to produce the movie to be viewed in a particular way. The same can be said of buildings, this project has the appearance of putting everything at a 45 degree angle. The success of this project isn't that the buildings appear slated, obviously they are not, but that the logic of the design is such that the buildings can appear to be slanting while still accommodating a vertical existence. So I would encourage you to explore and experiment with different ways of designing architecture, but I would also warn you not to go about it in a haphazard way. Treat it like a magic trick - something with a very ordinary apparatus, but that is delivered in a unique way.