Filmic Architecture VI:

This Workshop works across the disciplines of film and architecture with a series of exercises which build towards the design of ‘a house for’ a selected film director. This house is then constructed and filmed.

Each project begins with a reverse-engineered storyboard, where the work of a director is analysed using the forms and conventions closest to cinema production. These storyboards are layered with additional information such as orthographic drawings and depictions of soundscape. Next, readings specific to the director are analysed for a brief literature review to supplement the generalised discussion of cinematic theories. Each project then approaches the body and its conceptualisation within the film-maker’s oeuvre with reference to architectural precedents in this regard. This is developed into movement notations, diagrams of temporality, discussions of sound design, and an account of the production design in the selected films. This is then compared against appropriate architectural precedents in order to assist developing a brief for the director’s house. The design of the house is then constructed as a model, a series of drawings, or even an edit of found and specifically shot footage. A final storyboard plans the short films which complete each of the projects.

This year, students have approached directors including Shane Meadows, Bong Joon-Ho, David Fincher, Guiseppe Tornatore, Wong Kar Wai, Guy Ritchie, Ridley Scott, Riri Riza, Nobuhiro Yamashita, Christopher Nolan, S. S. Rajamouli, Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle, Yasmin Ahmad, Spike Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gus Van Sant, Jackie Chan, and Victor Vu.

Learning Outcomes:

• Through their engagement with a single director, participants gained a deeper appreciation of cinema and film theory and how to relate this to architecture.
• Participants used graphic methods in this exploration, learning new modes of inscriptive practice and redeploying known ones.
• The projects engage with the political, cultural, stylistic, and structural aspects of a key film director or other important auteur in the film-making process.
• Participants will also address how active audiences receive and adapt the messages conveyed by cinema, applying this to their understanding of architectural authorship and audiences.
• The overall aim is to widen participants’ repertoires as designers by stepping outside of their home discipline for a moment and understanding the ways in which film uses space, time, movement, atmosphere, sound, and narrative.