Designing from cinema: Film as trigger of the creative process in architecture

Abstract

The present paper examines, in a case study format, the use of films, short films and audiovisual documentaries as reasoning and references for design assignments during the first years of an architectural degree course. The aim of this fruitful and comparable experience is not so much to study and verify the well-known synergies between film and architecture, but to emphasize the methodological importance of endowing students in their first experience of design projects with realistic and feasible support – through visual references – that can increase their awareness of the desire for realism to which every project aspires. Project simulacrum finds an ally in the realistic fiction present in film. The association between film and architecture is thus placed at the service of learning and design methodology, as a means, not as an end.