The Cinematic Construct of New Commons.

 

 

The Cinematic Construct of New Commons frames and articulates a filmic and scenographic way of thinking through the architectural design. The unit investigates the process of the design, mediated through a new combination of filmic, essayistic and scenographic constructs - of what is real and what is ’common’ - as a new approach to architecture-making. 

The burgeoning political ideology of 'commons’ is considered as that which confronts and remedies the disintegration of the public domain. While challenging conventions of developing an architectural project we question: What can ‘commons’ do? What are the actions necessary to instigate a position of mutual ‘commonness’ to those gathered in a situation of a shared purpose? How can continuity, or infra-continuity, be established through recognisable re-occurrences albeit the temporal and spatial transience of each singular gathering? These questions have been posed in the two initial contexts of London, Mumbai and Berlin in particular large urban infrastructural transformations (eg. London Crossrail and Mumbai Maidan) implicating in promises and problematic's in their public realms.