Projections for the Urban Night: A Film-based Exploration in the Design Studio

Abstract

Film inspires the spatial and societal imaginations of architects and urban designers, and thus, design teachers have long been experimenting with films, filmic techniques, and filmmaking in the studio. Building on the course design and student output of an undergraduate architectural design studio entitled Projections for the Urban Night, this essay aims to demonstrate how film can be utilized as a pedagogical tool to examine the built environment and for imagining possible futures. The studio drew upon cinematic techniques of collage, storyboarding, physical model animation, and film essays for the development of individual proposals. Based on a discussion of student projects, the essay makes an argument for film to serve as more than representation, highlighting its potential as instigator for what to design.

The essay begins with a review and analysis of past experiments, examining how architects, urban designers, and design teachers have invoked film in relation to design. Contemporary pedagogic experiments using film tend to display an enchantment with the application of technology and digital media at the expense of critical reflections on the ideological frameworks that undergird the designs. The essay then moves on to the discussion of the specific studio in which the focus on the technological aspect was circumvented by asking students to develop scenarios for the near-future commoning of the urban night—drawing on the interdisciplinary research area of “Night Studies.” This discussion is supported by references to students’ explorations and the essay argues that the thematic intervention, asking students to design for the night, to develop programs that take into consideration social and physical activity after dark, opened up new possibilities to critique hegemonic practices.

Keywords:

• architecture
• education

Notes

Acknowledgements

Funding information: This studio was enabled by the 2018/19 Teaching and Learning Improvement Award of the Faculty of Engineering at McGill University.

Heartfelt thanks to studio critics Dr. Will Straw, whose pioneering expertise in Night Studies anchored the studio, and Dr. Alanna Thain, whose art practice “Cinema out of the Box,” which brings cinema to unconventional locations around Montreal, provided inspiration to the student projects.

Notes

1 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 239, 240.

2 Martino Stierli traces the use of the term “cinematographic” in architectural design to the Deutscher Werkbund. Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013), 163–164.

3 Rafael E. Pizzaro, “Urban Design and the Cinematic Arts,” in Companion to Urban Design, ed. Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 208–17; Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, 169–170.

4 Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, 153–162.

5 William H. Whyte, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), film, 55 min.

6 Buckley Craig, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 244.

7 Irene Sunwoo, “The Static Age,” AA Files, no. 61 (2010):118–29.

8 Pascal Schöning, Cinematic Architecture (Architectural Association, 2009).

9 I recount this from personal experience as I joined this unit in 1996–7. The unit participated in the 1994 Europa Exhibition in Linz, Austria with a public projection on a building and repeated this work on Bedford Square in London. For a brief review of Pascal Schöning’s work with Diploma 3, see Graham Cairns, “Cinematographic Architecture: Exercises in Theory and Practice,” in The Architecture of the Screen: Essays in Cinematographic Space (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect Books, 2013), 157–158.

10 For example, the work of Bartlett’s Unit 24 is viewable here: https://www.unittwentyfour.com.

11 Rafael E. Pizarro, “Teaching to Understand the Urban Sensorium in the Digital Age: Lessons from the Studio,” Design Studies, no. 30 (2009): 272–86; Rikke Munck Petersen and Mads Farsø, “Resonance and Transcendence of a Bodily Presence: How a Filmic Mapping of Non-Visual, Aural and Bodily Relations in Space Can Strengthen the Sensory Dimension in Landscape Architectural Design,” in Architecture Filmmaking: Making Visible, eds. Igea Troiani and Hugh Campbell (Chicago: Intellect. 2019), 301–19; Sara Mills, “The Pedagogy of Place: The Recording of Urban Patterns through Cinematic Investigative Techniques to Inform Place-making,” in The Production of Place 2012: An International Symposium and Workshops, December 15-18, 2012, University of East London, Docklands Campus, 2012; Roy Strickland, “Background into Foreground: Film as a Medium for Teaching Urban Design,” Places 18, no. 2 (2006): 44–51; Eliana Sousa Santos, Patricia Santos Pedrosa, and Paulo Figueiredo, “Parallel Cities: Film as Architectural Tool,” in Inter[sections]: A Conference on Architecture, City and Cinema, proceedings, Porto, Portugal, September 11–13, 2013, 354–63; Wowo Ding, “Mapping Urban Space: Moving Image as a Research Tool,” in Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image, eds. François Penz and Andong Lu (Chicago: Intellect, 2011), 257–79; Carmen Aroztegui, Irina Solovyova, and Upali Nanda, “Architectural Research and Representation: Expressing Sense of Place through Storyboarding and Animatics,” paper presented at the ARCC/EAAE International Conference on Architectural Research, Washington, DC, June 23–26, 2010, https://www.brikbase.org/content/architectural-research-and-representation-expressing-sense-place-through-storyboarding-and; Rene Davids, “Serial Visions: Storyboards in the Design Studio,” in Legacy + Aspirations: Considering the Future of Architectural Education: Proceedings of the 87th ACSA Annual Meeting, eds. Geraldine Forbes and Marvin Malecha (ACSA, 1999), https://www.acsa-arch.org/proceedings/Annual%20Meeting%20Proceedings/ACSA.AM.87/ACSA.AM.87.52.pdf; Marc Boumeester, “‘Camera Eye’: Cinematic Studio Research into Architectural Practice,” Architecture and Culture 3, no. 1 (2015): 87–104; Penelope Haralambidou, “The Architectural Essay Film,” Architectural Research Quarterly (arq) 19, no. 3 (2016): 234–48; Lee Anderson, “Film Theory and Architectural Design,” in ACADIA Conference Proceedings (St. Louis, 1994), 219–227, http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/Show?_id=241b; Julio Bermudez, “Designing Architectural Experiences: Using Computers to Construct Temporal 3D Narratives,” in ACADIA Conference Proceedings, Seattle, WA, October 19–22, 1995, 139–149, http://papers.cumincad.org/cgi-bin/works/paper/aab6.

12 Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, “Futuristic Gizmos, Conservative Ideals: On (Speculative) Anachronistic Design,” in Modes of Criticism, no. 1, February 27, 2015, https://modesofcriticism.org/author/luiza-prado-pedro-oliveira/.

13 City-by-city experiences differed around the world. For an overview of Istanbul, see Ipek Türeli, “Istanbul,” in Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination, eds. Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty, and Dietrich Neumann (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–9.

14 From within architectural history Cities of Light, and from urban planning Planning the Night-time City present disciplinary approaches to the study of the urban night: Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty, and Dietrich Neumann, eds., Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination (New York: Routledge, 2015); Marion Roberts and Adam Eldridge, Planning the Night-time City (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012). See also Ilse Van Liempt, Irina van Aalst, and Time Schwanen, eds., “Geographies of the Urban Night,” special issue of Urban Studies 52, no. 3 (2014).

15 Ezra Marcus, “Will the Last Confederate Statue Standing Turn Off the Lights? A monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., has become the site of an unlikely community space,” New York Times, June 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/statue-richmond-lee.html.

16 Lusi Morhayim, “Nightscapes of Play: Enjoyment of Architecture and Urban Space through Bicycling,” Antipode 50, no. 5 (2018): 1311–29.

17 Morhayim, “Nightscapes of Play.”

18 Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, “Night as Commons: Minor Architecture and Dayfaring Citizens,” Scapegoat, no. 10 (2017): 57–70.

19 James Taylor-Foster, “From Derelict Structure to Urban Cinema,” ArchDaily, August 6, 2014, https://www.archdaily.com/533710/from-the-archive-from-derelict-structure-to-urban-cinema.

20 Krzysztof Wodiczko, “The Tijuana Projection,” Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 3 (2003): 422–423, https://doi.org/10.1080/0893569032000131983.

21 See, for example, Ali Momeni and Stephanie Sherman, “A Manual for Urban Projection (MUP),” (Minnesota: Modern Press, 2017), http://c-uir.org/projects/manual-for-urban-projection/.

22 Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol; Chicago: Intellect, 2009).

23 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: les presses du reel, 2002).

24 The semester began with two hands-on workshops guest-taught by Montreal-based Creative Technologist Marouane Sahbi and Tokyo-based architect-filmmaker Keiichi Ogata respectively on projection mapping and collage making. Ogata is founder of the art-architecture collective “Cinematic Architecture.”

25 In particular the studio examined the work of British artist Jasmina Cibic and the Italian architecture group Superstudio by visiting exhibitions of their work.

26 Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, “Diversionary Tactics at Work: Making Meaning Through Misuse,” in Design History Beyond the Canon, eds. Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass, and Christopher S. Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 39.

27 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013), 90.

28 The “Light, Night and Urban Sustainability” symposium was organized by studio critic Dr. Will Straw and held on April 9, 2019, https://theurbannight.com/light-night-and-urban-systainability-a-symposium/.

29 Chris Marker’s La Jétee was shown to the students as a progenitor of the genre of essay film, and Victor Nieuwenhuys and Maartje Seyferth’s New Bablyon de Constant was shown as an example of the use of environmental sounds in animating architectural models. For an overview of essay film, see Yelizaveta Moss, “Essay Film,” in Cinema and Media Studies, ed. Krin Gabbard (Oxford University Press, 2021), accessed May 30, 2021, https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0216.xml.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ipek Türeli

Ipek Türeli is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. Her recent research interests include low-income housing and participatory design, civil protest and urban design, and campus landscapes and race. She has many publications on visualizations of the city in photography, film, exhibitions, and museums. Her research on Istanbul was awarded several fellowships and grants including by the Graham Foundation. Her publications include the coedited book Orienting Istanbul (2010) and authored book Istanbul Open City (2018).