Spring Symposium: SPATIOTEMPORAL
SoA Spring Symposium
SPATIOTEMPORAL
Experimental Film in Architectural and Urban Design
The disciplines of film and architecture have intersected each other in three primary ways over the first century of their coexistence:
1.
Filmmakers have visualized built environments (real and imagined) with the intent to tell stories, document histories, analyze conditions, and posit possibilities.
2.
Theorists have drawn connections between the psychosocial phenomena of cinematic perception and our lived experience of the built environment.
3.
Designers have applied inspirations found in cinematic depictions of buildings and cities toward their practices.
The last frontier is to integrate filmmaking into design practices more literally. The democratization of film production in the digital age overcomes the technological and economic obstacles that historically impeded such efforts, but aspect blindness continues to hinder integration: conventional understandings of what film is (and what it isn’t) are ingrained in the collective consciousness, and expectations regarding how architectural representation operates (and how it doesn’t) remain stubbornly traditional.
This symposium contends that filmmaking can (and should) be recognized as a foundational method of design thinking alongside drawing and modeling, and thereby as integral to both design education and practice. To illuminate that vision, it embraces and celebrates the genre of Post-War experimental film.
Most discourses on the reciprocity between film and architecture tend to overlook the abstraction of this genre in favor of the spatiotemporal immediacy inherent to narrative and documentary film. This symposium focuses squarely on the spatiotemporal abstraction inherent to experimental film—its critical distance from the reality that it represents.
Not unlike many conventions of architectural representation, in particular the diagram, experimental film dissects, isolates, and interrogates spatiotemporal qualities, albeit without (as of yet) the intention of architectural and urban designers. What if designers exploit the potential of this genre on their own terms in order to augment their already heightened perspective of the built environment? The capacity of film to produce spatiotemporal knowledge is acutely underutilized in design practice, and the realm of the diagram offers a testing ground for potential applications.
The symposium tackles both a methodological question (how to integrate the clear relevance of filmmaking to architecture into everyday design practice) and a theoretical one (how to evolve the role of the diagram as a generator of ideas in contemporary practice).
As technological innovations, global crises, and social agenda increasingly capture the attention and imagination of the discipline, new ways of seeing and new modes of knowledge-building are essential. Experimental film has held this potential for decades—this symposium will unleash it.
SCHEDULE
More information coming soon
Thursday, March 13, 2025
- 6:00 pm: Public screening in Uptown Charlotte of films by participating experimental filmmakers and student competition winners, followed by roundtable discussion with symposium participants
Friday, March 14, 2025:
- Afternoon panels with symposium participants and SoA faculty and students at Storrs Hall.
- Morning master classes with filmmakers at Storrs Hall.
Image: Ernie Gehr. New York Central. 2020. Digital video (color), 24 min. Courtesy the artist
This symposium is sponsored by AIA Charlotte.