Conceiving Landscape through Film: Filmic Explorations in Design Studio Teaching

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the media of film can be integrated, explored and can add value to architectural design studios and practice. It elucidates how film may offer an alternative position in architecture, where landscapes and cities are thought, planned and developed in closer relation to their spatial and sensory effects on humans. It underscores that the film camera can work as a kind of amplifier of how we, with our bodies, perceive space and project space. In the Landscape Film studio at the University of Copenhagen the film medium was tested as a combined registration and design tool for a new nature park south of Copenhagen. The final studio films and designs show how resonating recordings of sound, time and a bodily presence may simulate an Einfühling that inspires an alternative architecture of relations: the ambient, the changeable and the volatile. They also emphasize that an ability to work with bodily experience in both physical space and abstract design space is strengthened through the exploration of the film medium. Film becomes a “resonance tool” or “membrane” for the perceiver and conceiver, and contributes to a greater awareness of a bodily preconsciousness in architecture.

Keywords:

• architecture studio
• film
• body
• landscape architecture
• time
• sound

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mads Farsø

Mads Farsø and Rikke Munck Petersen are researchers in Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen, where they research and teach landscape architecture, urbanism, aesthetics and film. Mads is a practicing landscape architect Ph.D. in his studio, FARSØ HAVE, and initiated the Copenhagen Architecture Festival x Film. He has researched the potential of film to address inherent landscape qualities in the everyday life of the suburbs and an alternative aesthetic framework for the suburbs with a corresponding cinematic approach. Rikke has researched the potential of sensory parameters in landscape analysis, planning and design practice, the sequential and bodily approach at a regional scale, and an extended sensory awareness in relation to design processes. Rikke is coleader of the University of Copenhagen's Nature Park Amager project with responsibility for sensory and spatial explorations, analyses and interventions. Her Ph.D. thesis and studio, mupLA, has won prizes for projects of mainly larger and regional scale.

Rikke Munck Petersen

Mads Farsø and Rikke Munck Petersen are researchers in Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen, where they research and teach landscape architecture, urbanism, aesthetics and film. Mads is a practicing landscape architect Ph.D. in his studio, FARSØ HAVE, and initiated the Copenhagen Architecture Festival x Film. He has researched the potential of film to address inherent landscape qualities in the everyday life of the suburbs and an alternative aesthetic framework for the suburbs with a corresponding cinematic approach. Rikke has researched the potential of sensory parameters in landscape analysis, planning and design practice, the sequential and bodily approach at a regional scale, and an extended sensory awareness in relation to design processes. Rikke is coleader of the University of Copenhagen's Nature Park Amager project with responsibility for sensory and spatial explorations, analyses and interventions. Her Ph.D. thesis and studio, mupLA, has won prizes for projects of mainly larger and regional scale.