Historically the Park, Conventionally the Urban Drive-in

Outside
The space of film has made it to the streets, departing from the enclosed theatre soon after the advent of talkies. The self-contained theatre of the family car provided outing to the drive-in, where wholesome fun could be indulged in with the flexibility of varied childrearing styles including the freedom to be loud. Increase in land values, television, the VCR, and popularity of home screening rooms made for a greater privatization of experience with home theatres.

However, the metropolis of urban settings allow for city dwellers within the built fabric, the pursuit of moving images via other modes of transportation: the bicycle, public transit, pedestrianism. Still in search of social family fun, the color of celluloid, the scale of projections, and the renewing properties of open-air, the interest exists for the entertainment of film. The chosen space of an outdoor screening, in an urban context can find home in the park as the site often left un-infilled as for leisure, congregation, anonymity, reminders of the range, or the city’s iteration of the drive-in.

Parks as the thickening of the road allows for the turnoff—a deviation between destinations, meaning a break in the enclosed forms that house institutional functions. The park is a place for the pleasure of travel, detour, Sunday drive, dog walking locale since agrarian domestication, natural social scene, sunbathing sockless feet-in-grass, relaxing, returning to self, ultimate Frisbee impromptu choreography, people watching, other passing lives, passing lanes on film, visual stories of another destination.

Sitting
Projection on the sides of buildings animate their facades, re-appropriating either alley, sidewalk, or parking lot as opportunities to invite audience. Means for putting the body at rest to offer the user’s attention seems less accessible in terms of comfort without the site for rest as green space. With an increased ability to tune out hiccupping town sounds, the park bench incites taking a load off.

For a moment, the body is in position to view, a simultaneity to a series of park-based activities. With adjustment in terms of view orientation, seating now serves additive organized events hosted in the public space of the park. The bench may be an opportunity to create a microcosm of the park, with above ground planting opportunities. On casters, the micro-park travels to aggregate an amphitheatre for a traveling film festival, takes off down the street to partition commercial sidewalk fronts, or offers mini gardening locations for food production.

Origin
For ninety minutes, the street becomes home. The infrastructure of road, channeling flow, is symbolic of the kineticism of film: moving information responding to light, traversing a surface. Travel is involved as the body prepares to vanish, eyes taking to the illuminated field producing on-screen microenvironments, formed by interests and routes, in whatever capacity the parallel temporary landscape draws, often with implications of other cities entirely.

The space of theatre, garden, and park are re-appropriated public space after hours. The road leads to landscape urbanism: the adding of another layer, as occupancy of either user or intervention, upon the open-air space of the city. The park is your bike-in, walk-in, cine-al-fresco.