Staging Escape acknowledges an accelerating hunger for on-demand content, fed by the film and tv industry. Arguing that escapism is a vital practice in contemporary life, a source of comfort, and a means of sustaining sanity, the project seeks to challenge the conventions of architectures of the film and tv industry which tend towards large, simple sheds on peripheral sites and aims to reveal the functions, programmes and structures which support the creation of content streamed to our digital devices.
The proposal hybridises the five stages of content production – Design, Construct, Act, Record, Present – into a coherent building designed with practicality, performance (building and actor) and sustainability strategies at the forefront. It includes a cinema, housing units and hotel adjacent to the film production studios for large production companies to independent creators. The urban arrangement works with infrastructural conditions: busy underground rail tunnels, urban acoustics, the brownfield remnants of the earlier railway mineral depot, the density and calibration of Colonies housing. The intervention weaves, overlaps, intersects, collides and layers the various programmatic functions into a dynamic and complex form which appears to flow across the site yet is scaled to the massing of its urban context. The architectural language draws inspiration from set-construction scaffolding with both visible and hidden sides. CLT, glulam beam and reinforced concrete structure support an external material palette of zinc, composite laminate rainscreen and LED screen panels, while internally a polished concrete ground landscape features a series of [pixel]follies.
