short film
3:24
filmed, directed, edited, + narrated by Lydia Randall
starring Giulia
This film is a documentary about Scott Hall and the first year, first semester digital media assignment in which architecture students were required to draw the building as their final assignment in Fall 2018.
The building fits like a jigsaw piece into Carnegie Mellon's campus, and was designed with the university’s culture of collaboration and sustainability in mind. Scott Hall officially opened April 30, 2016.
University website
Within the cohort, students remember Scott Hall and the experience of drawing it as incredibly traumatizing. The assignment was due just a few days after their final studio review of the semester and most students wildly underestimated the time it would take to measure, draw, and render the space. This resulted in students setting up camp in the building, some staying overnight, and some going to extremes to ensure the accuracy of their projects. Scott Hall is on the other side of campus from the Margaret Morrison and CFA, the two building architecture freshmen primarily have their classes, so it was a completely foreign space to them. Additionally, because Scott Hall is built between two much older buildings on campus (Wean and Hammerschlag), There are many awkward, confusing, and misaligned moments in the building’s architecture, making it extremely difficult and frustrating to draw accurately.
The beginning of this film works to capture the confusion and juxtaposition students felt in the space by playing with the reflections the glass facades create and isolating these awkward architectural occurrences. A whole view of the space is not provided at the beginning to reflect the process of measuring specific areas of the space to create a complete drawing. The voiceover establishes limited context and sets the tone of the entire film. The interview of Giula shows how the memory of drawing the space is still present. The focused, isolated views of the details in the architecture also reflect how the students who did this assignment trained themselves to notice these details. The images and videos included from the time of the assignment are in black and white to distinguish between present day and Fall 2018. Despite what Giulia says, there is no new furniture and the space has not changed yet much time has passed.
Overall, this film argues that Scott Hall (or whatever it’s called) is architecturally weird, confusing, and frustrating which, ultimately, the attitudes that the 2023 graduating architecture students hold for that space to this day.