Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture

by François Penz

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life.

The everyday life is one the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. We move through our everyday environment in a state of distraction, as once remarked by Benjamin, and suffer from a form of double blindness. On the other hand, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence - a largely ignored and untapped resource. Films are 'equipment for living', they help us to understand architecture as experience while also providing an accelerated education in lived situations. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.

262 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2017

About the author

Biography:

Research

I study the history of the relationship between Cinema and Architecture in order to inform contemporary digital moving practice with a view to propose new modes of communication in architectural and urban issues.

Teaching

I currently supervise five PhD students working in the field of digitality, design and communications, architecture and the moving image. I teach an undergraduate lecture course in 1st, 2nd and 3rd year on The Culture of Images. I also give a series of seminars for the MAUS and MAUD MPhil courses on Urban Cinematics.

I am one of the core teachers in the University interdisciplinary MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures [based in MML].

Administration

I am the Director of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies

Research Interests

http://www.expressivespace.org/

My latest film involvement was about reconstructing a lost church in Florence, part of the Visions of Paradise exhibition at the National Gallery [showing until end of March 2016]: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/vis...

Reviews

[Alhamdamar Mudafiq · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Practical situations are usually formed spontaneously... by the given conditions of everyday life." So, be(a)ware of everyday life.

"The very idea of situation means that we are not outside it... we always within the situation."