This project began as an inquiry into the relationship between architecture and film, and how each of these two disciplines can potentially inform the other. Part of the answer was drawn from a quote from an Antonin Artaud essay where he proposes “a film with purely visual situations.” This physicality has its basic, most direct, and perhaps most extreme example in the stunt. The stunt has been an element of film which has essentially remained unchanged throughout the history of cinema. It is also in the stunt that we find a connection, not necessarily to architecture per se, but to architectonic form. The stunt is usually about movement through space, suspension, collision and about a direct instinctive relationship to immediate environment in such a way that objects such as furniture, appliances, or walls become abstracted for use within the context of the stunt situation. Out of this connection grew the concept of a stunt studio, which is essentially a school for stunting (studio in the sense of study) and is concerned with the theory and practice of the art of stunting for motion pictures.

The building developed into an exaggerated expression of Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture so that , for example, pilotis and roof garden which seemed to open up active exterior spaces below and above in Le Corbusier’s buildings, are interpreted into a scheme in which all sides of the building mass are open to fields of activity,  with roofs and floors used for horizontal movement, and exterior walls used for vertical movement. The free plan lends itself also to a flexibility in spatial configuration and transitional movement, while curtain walls / ribbon windows provide an ambiguity in the division between inside and outside. The idea of the ramp as a variation in temporal perception of both horizontal and vertical movement is a primary generator, creating a building which is itself a ramp, and throughout which  there are variations on circulation which would compress or expand time and space.

The site is a sliver of land which lies between the 134 freeway and the Los Angeles River, which is the dividing line between two realms – death (Forest Lawn Cemetery) and Disney (Disney and Burbank Studios). The river and freeway contain a similar literal duality in elevation (below/above) with the stunt school as a sectional transition joining these two conditions, straddling the fence between death and life, earth and sky.