Marie-Paule Macdonald (Associate Professor, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, Canada)
Moving images as architectural and urban design tools
Image sequences and contemporary technologies for creating moving images are tools for shaping urban and architectural space. This paper discusses practices of cinematic previsualization and editing, corresponding to methods of refining spatial sequencing in the design process. The complexity of any projected design or redesign of urban space is mirrored in, perhaps amplified by the capacity of the moving image to convey, even generate design ideas. Advanced cinema of the 1960s, shown in the Labyrinth and Kaleidoscope pavilions at Canadian Expo 67, proposed a collapse or simultaneity of perceptual divisions separating filmic art from life, in venues specially designed to project multiple moving images. There was an almost-convincing idea that observers would integrate projected moving images with reality. In the 21st century, ubiquitous computing, and its corollary, projected information on any available surface, lie within reach, while techniques of manipulating the moving image as a tool to understand and generate the design of built form are generally available user-friendly instruments. From film screening as source of spatial notions, examples include construction sequences documented in intervals over years and condensed into timelapse video, and collective works of urban design by groups adapting freely available software and technology. Inundated with images of the built environment, designers have opportunities to appropriate and translate moving images into instruments of design. ‘The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie’ wrote Walter Benjamin - his appraisal of the reception of mass media content versus individual aesthetic creation can be reconsidered in contemporary production of moving image. Once-rare fragments of film and video are diffused in low-resolution streams. Reception and production splinter into ever-thinner slices and specialized niches, while mass reception bathes in impressive spectacles of moving image projection.
