“Urbanism on Screen” Online Course

This course will introduce you to the history of cinema, architectural theory and urbanist discourse, presenting them as a field of intertwined correspondences, where some films are set against the backdrop of modern cities, while others (other film scripts) speculate on transformations of urban form yet to come. Film, taken as a historical document, never failed to capture urbanity at large, filtered through subjective visions and impressions on city form, capturing its infrastructural outgrowth and architectural change, be it Italian neorealism’s bombed-out sceneries, ran-down shacks and dockyards of the 1970s crime films, depicting urban sprawl at its edge, or the post-modern, fragmented metropolises in Blade Runner, Dark City and Run, Lola! Run! Architecture and cinema has always been a perfect match, however rarely has the latter been considered a tool/medium fit for critical analyses of urbanism. Architects like Bernard Tschumi, Kevin Lynch, Lebbeus Woods, Juhani Pallasmaa, or the Superstudio group employed filmic language (screenplays, narrative, editing/montage, cinematographic techniques) as both concepts and formal devices, searching for its counterparts in their own domain. However, in cinema, we were able to see depictions of the contemporary city and its future renditions, whose role is way more important than that of backdrops to the story. Taken as case studies, instances of filmic architecture will be investigated on the basis of their contextuality (role in the plot), historical styles, solutions and aesthetics they evoke, mimic, or mock, and cinematographic strategies chosen in order to convey a particular perspective on built environment.