#mohamedfakhry

[psu-architecture-film-course]

Written Component

Mohamed Fakhry

ARCH 433/FALL 2018

INSTRUCTOR Ian Harris

Mission

Portland, OR is a city with a growing homeless population, and the past few years have been mainly dominated by a rise of the cost of living in Portland. Moreover, in order to tackle that issue of homelessness around the city, we have been witnessing a rise in pods development, and houseless villages in different part of the city.

Abstract

First of all, we wanted to show a brief perspective of the homeless situation in Portland by talking to them, taking pictures, and sharing these in order to find how that issue affects the city. Afterwards, we approached a design based learning by looking at a community in Portland where sustainability has enabled them to create a space where everyone can feel like home, and that community was Cully Grove.

In order to show the differences, and commonality between a houseless village and the community we visited, we went a little further by visiting Dignity Village, one of Portland first homeless village started around the year 2000, and now home to approximately 48 residents who used to live in the streets.

Dignity is a space that has been created by assembling single pods and linking them together into one common space. It is a beautiful community where everyone feel like family, respect each other, and harmoniously live together.

In addition to that, visiting Dignity helped us understand the role that design can have in a community. We spent a day of service, learning, and sharing with both Dignity residents and Cully Grove residents. The purpose was to see how we could approach one space by looking at another one, and thus help solve the little gap between these two community in term of design and use of communal spaces.

The biggest challenge was to go out in the community and experience what it looks like to live in these space, and we tried to show that in our videos.

Then, it was important for us to develop our thinking and express our video by telling the story we wanted to tell. Well, homelessness is a big issue, and in Portland it is real. At the same time, architecture schools are working with the city to design small pods, and then village in order to tackle the homelessness crisis.

Project development

Our intention was and is, to show how design can help us achieve a great communal space for the houseless in the future are we designing more pods. Meaning that when we think about building individual pods, it would also be important to design the space itself instead of just focusing on the pods.

We made a process for our video by taking shots in downtown Portland, and then we visited Dignity village and spent a day here understanding the community. Finally, Cully Grove was an interesting communal space where we had a chance to better understand what we were doing.

week 4-5 First shots. Trying to better know the communities we were interested in by getting involved, exploring their communal spaces and the way the individuals living in these communities interact with each other.

week 6-7 Asking more questions until we found the right layout for our film, and applying class feedbacks into our work, one of the most important process that helped us develop the film. Using myself as a narrator to approach the video in a way that feel like a short documentary.

Week 8-9, more shots, polishing sounds effects, voice over and captioning on video. Also, understanding the right words to use and comfortably talk about the issue we are highlighting.

Course Reflection

This class presented an internal challenge as it was my first time spending intimate time with communities like the ones at Dignity and Cully Grove. It also helped me understand how architecture can transform our lives through the design of space that enhance our values, our belongings and our understanding of the way our live could be better organized in term of sustainability.

It was my first time taking a video class, and not only did I learn a lot from my own project, but also, the video critic in class helped me better look at the community and think about the way architecture can empower people, communities in needs, and spaces.

Overall, the class helped me develop my perspective about the way a film can be made, and the way a video can be developed to address some issues of our modern days.

The biggest takeaway from this course was the learning environment as well as the approach to making a smooth and impactful video using different design tools, different angles, and different elements of photography or video making (ex: photoshop, camera, phone, premiere, etc,...).

[psu-architecture-film-course]

[psu-architecture-film-course]