Machine for Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image

Catalog description

Architecture's relationship with cinema was established with the very first motion picture. In Sortie de l'usine Lumiere de Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumiere we see a didactic presentation of film titles as workers from the Lumiere brother's factory stream forth from its interior at days end. In many ways the context of the film is its subject as well. The title of the class plays on Le Corbusier's maxim that architecture is machine for living and perhaps cinema is simply a machine for helping us understand the vast construct of our built environment. A device, which allows us to imagine even greater follies or more importantly to think critically about architecture's relationship with and impact on society. Readings, screenings, discussions and critiques make up the curriculum along with studio time. Students will produce their own film and we will look at films produced by a range of practitioners: From architects speculating on the nature of and use of public space and urban development to documentarians researching the pathologies of neo-liberalism and its effect on the privatization of space. We will also look at the work of artists who engage with the poetics of space and who unpack the conflicted legacies of the built environment.