Instructed by architect and professor Elena Perez Guembe at RPI, I built upon my knowledge of design strategies, software, and process by designing a house. A chosen filmmaker would be the resident, and the compositions of their movies would inspire the designed form. I was assigned House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004), a beautiful and complex martial arts movie.
I began by choosing a three-second clip, depicting a dancer as she spins across the room, scarves swirling around her. The fabric moved in a vortex-like motion, and the clip provided 72 frames of information to work with.
Choosing the twenty clearest and most significant frames from the sequence, I translated the movement of the scarves into 2D and 3D space with Rhino software. For the first model assignment, these frames were constructed as physical form that the architecture of the final house would be based upon.
For the midterm project, I turned my geometry into a small, prototype home for the film director. Orienting my forms vertically created a naturally-stepping space, which became the framework for my two-level dwelling.
For my final house, I decided to return my geometry to its original orientation, and opted to embed it into a rolling landscape that moved with the incremental frames. The result was an almost wave-like composition, which resembled the graceful scarf dance of the source material. By mirroring the house, I created a reflected space for two residents, seen in the drawings and renderings below.