Architectural Episodes

Abstract

This graduation thesis explores architecture as a cinematic tool to induce interaction, emotional response, and social cohesion in fragmented urban contexts. Set in Sundholm, Copenhagen, a site suspended between care and neglect, order and disorder, the project seeks to mediate opposing conditions and foster moments of encounter across vulnerable societal groups. Sundholm today exists as a palimpsest: a former institutional landscape now challenged by physical disconnection, stigmatization, and socio-economic stratification. Yet, within these ruptures lies the potential for architecture to act as a bridge.

Through a research by design methodology, the project investigates how spatial sequencing and montage theory, rooted in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Bernard Tschumi, can be spatialized as tools for healing and coexistence. In this approach, the city is read not as a static composition, but as a sequence of dramatic episodes. Architecture is thus not the backdrop but the medium through which social contradictions can be staged, softened, or reconfigured. The project poses the central question: how can induction, inspired by cinematic montage, be introduced as an architectural tool to promote social cohesion in fragmented urban space?

The proposed design is a Public Condenser, a hybrid cultural and social infrastructure that curates layered programs through episodic transitions. It is both porous and programmatically dense, allowing everyday rituals such as gardening, making, cooking, and resting to become shared experiences. The building narrates a story of Sundholm through spatial gradients, from dark to light, compressed to open, loud to quiet. This fluctuation in intensity and pace stimulates interactivity and self-awareness while allowing users to adapt according to need and state of mind. The architecture enables co-presence without forced participation, inviting its users—children, addicts, elderly, families—to encounter the other, or withdraw when necessary.

Cinematic techniques such as juxtaposition, rhythm, and the Kuleshov effect are reinterpreted architecturally through shifting thresholds, visual cues, and temporal variations in spatial experience. The use of nature through vertical gardens, water features, and crafted material transitions adds a sensory layer of calm and spatial legibility. The project also draws from neuropsychological and phenomenological research, suggesting that both addicts and children are neurologically and emotionally reactive to spatial cues, making architectural sensitivity not only desirable but necessary.

The design strategy is developed through layered media: storyboards, diagrams, interviews, and speculative collages that map behavioral sequences in urban space. These methods are used to construct a spatial narrative that does not eliminate chaos but renders it navigable. By framing social collisions as opportunities for spatial induction rather than barriers, the project reframes architecture as an active player in constructing shared memory and public imagination.

Ultimately, this thesis proposes a spatial scenography of the public, a cultural framework where architecture acts not as shelter or spectacle, but as a script for resilient coexistence. It is an attempt to curate space as an emotional, political, and social experience, one that embraces the complexity of contemporary urban life and transforms it into a meaningful sequence of interactions.