‘REPORTS GIVEN BY IMAGES’ – FILM AS A CRITICAL MEDIUM FOR ARCHITECTURAL INTERIORITY
- Publication Type:
- Article
- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-05T01:29:34Z
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"Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images" (Sontag 153).
The computer has fast eclipsed manual drawing as the prime source of architectural
representation in architectural schools. Studios are relinquishing drawing boards, and students
spend long hours in dark computer laboratories, alienated from light and the awareness of
passing time. While digital media have opened up new possibilities of experiential, real-time
and interactive forms, its new animated form is distinct from the tradition of established moving
image narratives, such as film.
The narrative traditions, privileged in conventional computer architecture, frequently render the
interior lifeless, objective and emotionally distant. They deny the point of occupation where
architectural "circulation" becomes interior design's "lifestyle," and where architectural
"durability" is challenged by the surface alterations and changes inflicted by habitation. This is
also the point where the volatility of time (as fashion, and the consequences of moving through
and living in space) impacts. Time and change are concerns for fashion-conscious interiors
rather than for the timelessness stereotypically associated with architecture. It is this particular
affinity with time (deformation, wear, fashion) which suggests a critical need for representations
of the interior of architecture to assertively engage with time-based and strategically subjective
representational media. The paper hence argues a need to assertively deploy film as a
representational strategy which actively engages the less measurable aspects of habitation.
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