It’s really wonderful sometimes how the many facets of your life line up together sometimes.

I am currently enrolled in a studio in which I am designing an entertainment center for a small town that is interested in enticing more extreme sports tourism to its community. For those of you unfamiliar with the building type, an entertainment center is basically a cross between a mall and a theme park. You go to look at products like at a mall, but the emphasis is more on playing with them rather than buying, similar to a theme park. It’s still, however, very consumer-oriented, a mecca of material worship. Entertainment Centers are a fairly new idea in urban building, and there aren’t many yet, but the few that have been built have been very successful. One example is Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. This place opened its doors hoping for a patronage of 10,000 a day, and got 20,000 immediately. Our modern culture, as of so far, loves these places. Often they include other types of entertainment rahter than simply product trial, like internet cafes, restaurants, movie theatres, music halls, etc. My particular program requests music halls, which is very appropriate for the youth-oriented culture surrounding extreme sports.

So I am researching project precedents for this building type such as theme park design and Yerba Buena in studio, and at the same time reading about how to animate in Flash for the animated portion of this website, my portfolio. And somehow I am reading about animation, and how to build animated designs, for both. It was quite thrilling to realize the crossover, and quite unexpected. Although now that I have read and studied both, I see the connection between the two so solidly it seems silly to have never seen it before. Architecture is about bringing of dreams into reality just as much as any drawing or other artwork or animation is, and the rules (or at least the set of rules I stumbled upon as set down by Walt Disney) translate as much into built places as a drawing or sculpture or painting. Built places can be exaggerated, staged, and a storied journey. They can surprise, captivate, and engross someone, and have happy or sad endings. Architecture is a solid form of animation.

I am excited to think of how I could capitalize upon this connection, and perhaps explore it more thoroughly.