Gabriel Francis Cruz Tallara - BA3

The aim of this essay is to see how Bong Joon-ho expresses the underlying issues of social injustice within Parasite (2019) through the languages of cinematography and architecture. The essay uses the theories of Reyner Banham from Theory and Design in The First Machine Age (1960) and David Harvey’s view of what it means to have Rights to The City (2003). Edward Soja’s concept of ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (2010) links Harvey’s views of the creation of social injustice how these unjust actions affect the geographies of our cities. To understand the meaning of space within architecture, Bruno Zevi (1974) further explains how effective the representation of space within plans and elevations, through architectural drawings. This theoretical structure is then used as a toolkit to analyse the film’s cinematography and architecture, illustrating the material and immaterial realities of social hierarchies in architecture.

Marina Tremouri - MArch2

The focus of this research is to demonstrate the significant value and importance of digital heritage, and to provide research and innovative methods that can further develop this new process, specifically in relation to the churches of Cyprus.

So, why is it necessary to maintain the historical monuments of the past through digitisation? In the 21st century, a range of tools and technologies have enabled cultural heritage to be protected against disruption, vandalism and theft. In this case, in order to verify and solve the remaining problems, practitioners can generate protection through virtual 3D modelling work.

Through using integrated media to conserve, protect and view these particular types of culture, UNESCO plays an emerging role in digital heritage. The thesis analyses a variety of computer tools and technologies for studying the preservation of heritage and culture. Whilst virtual technology cannot always retain the intended meaning of memory, history, spiritual heritage and tradition as a religious building does, digital reconstructions can still assure and sustain its culture. By means of different case studies with a long-standing history, but also through key, primary studies undertaken on the religious monuments in Cyprus, this thesis formulates an argument about their technical prospects. Technology has managed to retain much of its prosperous, refined legacy, amid the island’s multiple invasions, and their impact on its architecture. The primary purpose of this academic analysis is to show how digital alternatives are discussed and articulated. However, it is also important to critically appreciate the usage of digital technology, since its comprehensive high-level virtual environment does not always represent the originality of the monument.

Olivia Neves Mara

According to the National Community Land Trust Network, CLTs are “set up and run by ordinary people to develop and manage homes as well as other assets important to that community, like community enterprises, food growing or workspaces. Thereby CLTs act as long-term stewards of housing, ensuring that it remains genuinely affordable, based on what people earn in their area, not just for now but for every future occupier.”

The present research investigates several CLTs in London, and similar schemes in Zurich, Barcelona, and Stockholm, to construct thoroughly architectural perspectives on community-led housing. The main question driving these investigations is whether and how processes of commoning may take place within CLTs. Upon these findings, our agenda is to reconsider these urban events as counter projects, through which local associations may practice alternative ways of co-existing in the contemporary city. In this sense, CLTs are not just legal mechanisms of reclaiming land for affordable housing but also possible platforms for occupying members to live in common.

As both CLTs and commoning are relatively new to architecture cultures and practices, our cohort uses analytical drawing as a method to assess these concepts from formal and spatial points of view. The research develops as a five-year project centred on the survey, mapping, drawing, and analyses of several of the 263 CLTs which currently spread across England and Wales. Starting from London as a paradigm, our project is to produce a collective book of visual essays exposing the very situations where commoning happens within existing CLTs. The aim to take this knowledge as a basis for the production of several 1:1 models of construction elements and an exhibition of design propositions for emerging cases of CLTs.

Carla Molinari

In 1929, Herbert Bayer created a diagram entitled ‘Extended Vision’, arguing that displaying design is usually limited to a very restricted horizontal perspective, while it should instead consider an expanded field of vision. Indeed, influenced by the effects of bodily movements, he suggested an alternative design method, based on arranging a series of planes - potentially 360 degrees around the viewer – following a ‘desired sequence of impressions’.

Through the constant use of digital devices, our field of vision of spaces is expanding vertiginously. In particular, in cities, the user experience seems to be defined by infinite, unexplored planes and dimensions that go far beyond physical reality. How can we better conceive, but also design, this multidimensional urban space?

This paper argues that the method of displaying ‘impressions’ in sequence could be a useful technique to arrange and define the contemporary cinematic urban experience, finally bonding the physical space to the virtual extent of digital devices.

‘The human being is mercilessly exposed today to a never-ending attack of influences, messages, and impressions. We cannot readily reduce the quantity of these attacks, but we must learn how to concentrate the messages, how to omit the nonessential, and, above all, how to improve our techniques of communication.’ (Bayer, 1961)

Starting from Bayer’s ideas, but also exploring related studies developed by El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy about the use of montage and assemblage as communicative methods, this research will focus on the potentialities of sequences in arranging messages in space, and dealing with the constant flux of images and data that today invests our cities.

The main aim is to suggest sequences as a design method able to manage these ‘never-ending attack of influences, messages, and impressions’ and compose nowadays multi-layered urban space, finally theorizing an Extended Digital Field of Vision.

Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media AI and Big Data. The AMPS 2021 Conference in partnership with the University of Hertfordshire Conference – 28/30 June 2021

Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills

The paper questions the assumed opposition between the immateriality of films and the material basis of architecture by unravelling a possible shared domain of ‘scenic’ constructs which can be considered as the material artifice of films and the immaterial confluence of architectural spaces. In order to overcome the reductive dichotomy of material versus immaterial, the construct of ‘scenes’ is further complicated in the paper through the identification of two distinct processes – constellating and grafting – that relate, penetrate, translate and interrogate between filmic, scenographic and architectural practices. The notion of ‘infrastitial scenes’ is construed as the stitching of differences in the mode of ‘grafting’ and the simultaneous transitioning of in the mode of ‘constellating’, both propelled by the mechanism of returning, essaying gaze shared between filmic and architectural experiences. Infra- implies that which is just below the horizon of awareness, and -stitial implies the recognition of the in-between, the intervening the intention to articulate, apply and theorize these moments of disjointed, tacit and elusive transformations between spaces, bodies and consciousness is to resist the subordination of such experiences by the dominant imperative in conventional architectural methods to objectify, rationalize and neutralize.

Paper presented at the 2021 Architecture and Film Symposium at Ball State University

Carla Molinari - Paper published in The Journal of Architecture

The article ‘Montage and Architecture’ by Sergei Ejzenštejn, written between 1937 and 1940 and published posthumously, is one of the pivotal texts theorising montage as a method of composition, with a special focus on the potential of cinematic sequences in architecture. Despite the deep interest and the great number of studies that the publication of this text inspired in the last decades, Ejzenštejn’s analysis of the Basilica of Saint Peter, which occupies almost half of the article, has been overlooked. This article focuses on Ejzenštejn’s sequential interpretation of the Basilica and compares it with the one offered in 1952 by Luigi Moretti in the article ‘Strutture e Sequenze di Spazi’ [‘Structures and Sequences of Spaces’]. Examining Ejzenštejn’s and Moretti’s texts and related visual products, it develops a different way of considering the sequential qualities of the Basilica. Indeed, while Moretti proposes sequences as a method to design and represent three-dimensional spaces, the concept of montage as theorised by Ejzenštejn focuses on two-dimensional sequences as a tool to arrange images in space. The article proposes a series of possible common points between Ejzenštejn’s and Moretti’s theories, on the basis of a shared vision of sequences as mental constructs, and engages with a wider discussion on the dilemma between visual and spatial properties of architecture.