Cinemathequetonics

The Most Amazing Pile of Books is Waiting for You on the Street.

2010-10-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

Saturday was unpredictable. A flat tire on the way home from the farmer's market, paired with my parent's car for the weekend, inspired me to take advantage of all the 5cent wine at bevmo. Having left the ten bottles and my two bags of veggies, along with my bike, at the store, I was roaming free in the sun. Walking back to my house, I saw this pile of books on the corner of Rhode Island and 25th.

All paperback, all from a pretty narrow band of time between the mid 70's and early 80's, meaning these books (or their equivalent) where on the shelves of my childhood. They represent a Bay Area-centric activist intellectualism that is familiar to my upbringing and my current reality. Searching through them was like a brief survey of a distinct and focused personality: a nice selection of classic novels by Henry James and Jane Austin, a couple existentialist surveys, a number of books on agendized teaching techniques, some cool old eating and traveling books for northern California, and finally a number of law texts.

Obviously, I was drawn to the graphics of these covers, but I couldn't take home these two big boxes of books so I used the phone to catalog some of the greatest hits; bringing up a whole other set of questions about "having" things and the superficial response to books as aesthetic objects instead of content providers. One gets overwhelmed by the intellectual options embedded in such a pile and is just happy that there is some way to access all this stuff that you could never find time to fully absorb... so, the "having" is the collective looking, the potential usefulness of these previously un-digitalized compositions. I think.

1600 pix versions of all these images can be found here: books on street.

Not quite as found, the keepers are closest to my feet, I hope some young-radical art teacher found the rest.

Rhino News, etc.: What's New in Rhino 5 WIP, free webinar

2010-10-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

The few people who read my blog have either been using Rhino 5 for a year or don't care at all about, or know what, a "nurb" is. But nonetheless I will post this because it really is the greatest software and the little hand pushing back against the simple-thinking of SketchUp and the lumbering behemoth of Autodesk.

What's New in Rhino 5 WIP, free webinar

vestigal

2010-09-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

Recent Work: Football in the matrix.

2010-09-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

This video was produced as an intro for the Visa Financial Football Online video game. The game is designed to teach financial literacy to teens. The intro video is designed to make that seem totally awesome.
SevenDesign in SF hired me to produce this. The players were meticulously rotoscoped in After Effects where the animation was composited. The live-action footage came from Uberstock in Oregon. The 3d stadium footage was produced in Rhino.

Whale Nights in SOMA

2010-05-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Further exploration of existing footage and time.

Even with party footage there is an uncanny quality to slow motion action and the social dynamics it reveals.

Home Movies

2010-05-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

A while back I bought the Panasonic HDC-TM300, it is a nice little HD camera that I should use much more often. But I have shot a number of sequences over the last few months. The first two I edited are of very sweet kids in the holiday aura of Thanksgiving. Aidan, Mae, and Luke Hutchinson are my cousins living in Marin with their very cool parents. These shorts are edited; attempting to be interesting to non-family members.

For HD versions go to my vimeo page.

Revisiting the space bunker

2010-05-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

Within the perpetual introspection cloud comes the question that one is most often asked by others, "why architecture?" I'm guessing this question is asked to those in other fields as well, but perhaps the BA in film makes it more likely to come to me. If one sees architecture as tied to construction and cinema tied to fantasy than the two could seem disparate but if they are both seen as modes of narative and projected expressions of societal memes than no two forms are more similar. Just like most people I discovered my interests through the informative excursions of youth (what you might call "field trips"), as a child I began to respect the built environment as an active actor in my self-narrated experience.

The Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley hills was one of the first places I really noticed as a kid, people call it ugly, this is a tragically shallow criticism, it is intriguing and that is exactly what it should be. Buildings like this become icons because they represent an other-ness to a kid, they signify departure and that is mind-opening. I think these monolithic and crystalline hunks of concrete, hundreds of feet above the bay, are a thrilling metaphor for the elevated yet inwardly focused world of science.

The sculptural aspects of architecture are much maligned by a public afraid of change and by a profession trained in "rationality" but wonder serves a distinct purpose for the uninitiated, I am not the only one who came to appreciate narrative space through the experimental fringes of architecture.

Lawrence Hall Photo Gallery

Recent Work

2010-05-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have been working for a while on this SFjazz project for mark Cavagnero associates, the renderings I produced were finally released to the public: Curbed SF Article.

2010-04-29T13:25:00.001-07:00

Hi Everybody,

I have spent the last week going to the Castro watching Stanley Kubrick movies every day, it has been incredible. But I thought I would send a reminder to you all who seem potentially interested in viewing this generously-referenced masterpiece in our city's most beautiful movie theater in cinemascope. You have not seen this movie if you have never seen it as light projected through celluloid in a big dark room with other people having their mind blown.

Get there early, me and Mr. Ageno will be there at 7:30, maybe earlier, if you are coming let me know and I will save seats.

Aaron

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 2:30, 8:00
Cinema was taken to a new subliminal level with this brilliant film tracing the dawn of man to his contact with new life. With Kier Dullea, Gary Lockwood, the voice of Douglas Rain | 1968 | 141 min | 35mm ‘Scope

The New Grotesque

2010-04-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Francis bacon meets David Lynch at Pixar.

Wowzers, this makes me feel something un -nameable and intense, it is Beyond the Valley of the Uncanny.

CHRIS MARKER'S LE JOLI MAI

2010-03-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

CHRIS MARKER'S LE JOLI MAI

This is a special opportunity to see a real celluloid print from the man who brought you the most awesome 16 minutes of cinema ever, La Jetee.

I've been to a couple of these anniversary screenings and I can't overstate how much more impact seeing the light move through the film has than a DVD presentation or a web-clip (ew). The visual character of grain and light being obstructed to create black as opposed to compounded for a near-black is awesome but so is the knowledge that this thing, the film object, is a piece of curated and maintained art history... someone call J.Berger I am feeling an aura.

Non-stop Kubrick madness for real.

2010-03-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

Whoa! This is a pretty incredible opportunity...

from the Castro website :

Stanley Kubrick's filmmaking approach was perfection; in story, suspense, satire, special effects, sound design, and often a searing reveal of the human condition. No other filmmaker has earned a greater collective public anticipation with each successive work. Spending years in intense research and many months in meticulous production, his films remain testaments to his obsessive commitment to excellence. The Castro Theatre proudly presents this nearly complete retrospective, 12 monumental cinematic achievements on our immense screen in glorious 35mm.

APR 23 The Shining + Full Metal Jacket

APR 24 A Clockwork Orange + Barry Lyndon
APR 25 Spartacus + Paths of Glory

APR 27 Dr. Strangelove + The Killing
APR 28 Lolita + Eyes Wide Shut
APR 29 2001: A Space Odyssey + A.I.

Woody Allen's Interiors palette

2010-03-05T18:07:00.000-08:00

I found these still images from Interiors and was reminded that I used them to create a photo-referenced color palette a little while back using Kuler. I keep meaning to write an essay about this fantastic film and the modest brilliance of Woody Allen's dramas but I haven't quite gotten there. For now I think these images can attest to the incredible set design and uber-restrained art direction in this cinematographic masterpiece... and the colors look great on a layout.

A

what you see while you make it 06

2010-02-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

spaced framing

Although previously resistant, at the end of last week I convinced myself that I could complete a job-related task using Grasshopper and so I had an excuse to learn it. I spent half of the weekend making my way through the tutorials on DigitalToolbox and it turned out to be pretty fun. But of course, to acknowledge the title of this image series, I need to mention the simple visual delight of the interface; almost every person who came by the desk was as interested in the graphical representation of the modules as they where in the geometry it produced. I think this is an essential element to the success of the software. I mean, how else are you gonna make people want to do a bunch of math?

what you see while you make it 05

2010-02-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

layer snaps

Turns out there is a z dimension to Autocad that goes unnoticed until someone opens the thing up and rotates that drawing surface and (once again) becomes easily seduced by spatialized vectors.

bike on a wire

2010-01-16T12:57:00.001-08:00

Fantastic and elegantly executed.

http://kolelinia.com/en/

what you see while you make It 04

2009-11-05T12:45:00.000-08:00

And then there is the detail-render material test: As one nears photo-realism every little piece of material needs to be resolved in some way so that it does not cause special attention to be paid to itself , and so one produces a huge number of these little architecturally insignificant vignettes on the way to a "finished" whole image. Here we see stone, a zinc roof, low iron glass and (a very subtly) striped frosted interior glazing, all with a little touch of the accidental Magritte.

what you see while you make It 03

2009-10-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here it is again, that selection color, even in relatively normative buildings the isolation of specific elements can suggest new scales of understanding. Is this the size of a flashdrive, handbag, or airplane hanger? competing surfaces appear to be wrapped layers...

what you see while you make It 02

2009-10-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

My selection color is ultra-magenta, so often, while working, I select something and the screen becomes instantly hyper-graphic... My entire working-layout is organized to give me just a little bit of sense-pleasure while in process... plus, everybody loves vertical circulation.

what you see while you make It

2009-10-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

so in the process of creating architecture, or at least it's drawings*, one can find themselves looking at some fascinating happenstances of digital-visual creation (especially without context). As all I do at this time is work, constantly, I end up seeing a lot of these... I am pretty sure blogs exist for the sharing of such minor novelties, here is the first one:

*really a whole other discussion, I have a tendency to believe architecture has more to do with the power of imagination and the evocation of perspectival space through pictures than with, you know, "buildings".

smooth as pixels

2009-10-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

Inexorably, and in equal measure, drawn to and repelled by this :

As to the Issue of Self-Representation in the Digital World

2009-08-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Clearly, this becomes hugely problematic as one attempts to create a delaminated identity within the myriad social networking sites and blogs, etc. The central issue is that the photo you chose is known as such, and therefore its very existence opens you up to criticism and assumption. There is no way out of this, we all know the trouble of seeing ourselves being seen and, therefore, we all know the difficulty in designing the nature of that image. So, no matter what your explicit intention, you are stymied by the audience's knowledge of your own authorship of your digi-self. But, because you know people know this, you try and work around it with a post-ironic directness that acknowledges the mutual understanding of the inherent selection process. This has become a rather popular method, it is often expressed with the selection of a “objectively bad” image (this author can’t bring himself to actually use the word objectively due to similar issues of self-reflexivity as the ones being currently discussed in this paragraph); unfortunately, this strategy can appear even more pretentious, as it has an obvious kind of superficial antagonism that reveals the individual to be extremely self-conscious, in his over-the-top effort to create the appearance of notgivingafuck. The other approach is the poorly framed, off-kilter, usually in a group, photo: the casually flattering candid. Wherein, it is hoped, the viewer assumes a kind of egalitarian lack of self-consciousness, only fueled by the simple desire to “show a good time with friends”. (Interestingly, this method came out of what was the original profile-photo-creation technique: find a group shot where you look good, now cut everyone else out: there were a lot of limbs and anonymous side-frame shoulders in the early days of Friendster.) And, finally, there is the logo/default/no image approach, where there is no photo just a graphic of some kind; hugely popular with designers and of course explicitly “cool” in it’s restraint. The issue here is that we are humans and humans like to see with whom they are communicating; we are more than the work we produce, we are individuals, with faces. If one chooses to participate in the online self-making, this too must be acknowledged.

This image now appears in the "information" section of my website.
The source photo was taken, candidly, as I stood up, by Joe Perez-Green in the Kunsthaus by Peter Zumthor Museum (a museum in Alpine Austria), the pasted image behind me is a graphic I made while working on a digital topo; I extended the wall by using the warp tool in Photoshop. I appear to be very serious, yet I am wearing white, 5 dollar flip-flops. Later that night I slept in a castle.

The reduced deduced.

2009-08-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

I have a tendency to believe that all great music videos are the ones that only attempt to accomplish one idea at a time, either that or inappropriately complex narratives that have only a tenuous connection to the thematic content of the song (see every MJ video post-thriller or November Rain, of course this particular brand of video is quickly disappearing as the music industry dies). So here, in this Phoenix video, there is a nice clear idea about concept; we will project light on the band in a choreographed sequence that matches the song's changes. But then there is a confusion about it, as we cut to the CU on the band there is an intense, colorific, halo that surrounds them, the concept is suddenly at risk. The desperation for veracity in our current era of visual mis-trust is interesting, I would prefer this to be a lock down, or maybe even pan&scan, as the lights changed, we then get a sense of "performance", not of the musicians but of the lights.
1901 collaboration video

Bedroom

2009-08-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

This is a film by my friend Jake Sollins, who, I believe, is a genius of reductive thinking. Great ideas don't need a costume.

I often make waffles.

2009-08-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

disgarded tools of a developing practice

2009-08-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

They now become color palette reference. But, no matter how hard I try to match them in the computer, you just can't beat shiny plastic.

Euclidean

2009-08-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

I was at Aardvark books on Church looking for Infinite Jest used (now very hard to find because of the whole suicide business) and as I waited for the secondary shelf search to conclude I saw these Euclidean Geometry introduction books. Really lovely covers, really dense interiors. I couldn't find the exact same ones online but instead discovered that all of these books have amazing color combinations and impressively refined graphics... they have a unified style, one wonders if it is something "discussed" or if super smart math geeks just found something that seemed to work and moved on, no further discussion.

Thesis presentation film.

2008-11-13T22:54:00.000-08:00

Watch it here.

Lautner at the Hammer

2008-11-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

Going down to Los Angeles a few weekends ago I decided to step into a soon-to-close exhibition at the Hammer Museum: "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner." Having written this summer on Lautner's work and its influence in contemporary cinema it was hard to avoid the show's relevance. Lautner gets associated with the so-called “Googie” style of Southern California architecture because of his desire to design with the car in mind. Leading to what, he believed, was the necessary creation of expressionistic form; architecture as a road-side magnet in the new 55mph world. Some of this work was on display and it was goofy, but to write Lautner of as a simple showman of a tacky style is clearly a mistake.

The program presents Lautner as a forbearer to the highly sculptural "plastic" architecture of our current moment. Walking the exhibition, it is tempting to draw the suggested parallels between his work and that of Ghery, Hadid or Denari, but the post-cinematic-image quality of so much of his work makes the connection suspect. The amorphous media presence of so many on-location cameos blurs the line between actual influence and the seeping mileu of retro-futurism, that no doubt influenced these children of the mid-century. Was it Lautner or Ken Adam's set design for the 007 films that continues to rest in the collective imagination of the current batch of envelope-pushers? His work almost always exists in dialog with other totally synthesized forms and locations when appearing in cinema (the Elrod House in Diamonds are Forever, 1971, for instance). Lautner’s architecture is like a satellite from the world of make-believe that has somehow crossed the threshold into reality.

Lautner is in the rare position, for such an aggressive formalist, of being disregarded by the architectural establishment but embraced by the dominant culture. But what his architecture signifies in cinema is rarely positive. The film "LA Plays Itself", presents a cogent inspection of modernisms role in mid-late twentieth century American cinema. Calling Lautner "the architect Hollywood most loves to hate", it is revealed that crooked cops (Twilight, 1998), porn kings (Big Lebowksi, 1998), serial killers(Body Double, 1984), and drug dealers (Leathal Weapon 2, 1989, where the Garcia Residence is actually ripped from the hillside by Mel Gibson's angry cop, Riggs) are all equally comfortable in Lautner's homes. In cinema, modernism is often a direct indicator of narcissism, nihilism, and other various forms of sociopathy. It is as though to live in such a clean and designed space requires a total denial of all societal norms and attachments. Lautner’s desire to build in concert with nature and desire becomes convoluted into shorthand for evil.

For Lautner, architecture was a catalyst between nature and man, architecture as the designed mediator heightening nature instead of competing with it. Lautner said, "A building might be shaped to dissolve its confines entirely." He was obsessed with the very qualities that make his spaces so photogenic; it is no accident that his designs "work" so well on-screen. Many of his drawings displayed in the exhibition are studies of sight-lines within the building: constructing an effective viewport to nature from multiple perspectives within a given space. The large-scale, low-detail, section models in the galleries are meant to heighten this purpose, as they allow for the full insertion of one's head so as to gaze out of the interior windows, facilitating ones view of a wall-painted vista. When his houses appear on-screen one designed mediation compliments another.

"Going Up"

2008-10-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

going up from Aaron Taylor Harvey on Vimeo.

2008-10-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

Eliasson is the true cinemathequetician. The guy cuts to the core of the meaning of experience with preternatural acumen.

"Take on Me" meta-karaoke version.

2008-10-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure this can be directly related to cinemathequetonics but I will give it the ole grad-school-disparate-paths-of-logic try.

We had pre-thesis review talk yesterday and I decided to approach it as a chance to lay out all the things my thesis was not about, maybe I'll list those in another post. One thing that came up was the use of drawings (by hand, remember those?) to diagram different sorts of shots and cuts that exist in cinema. My professor was a bit suspicious of this, worried that it would maybe pull things of track to show "sketches". He then said, "well I guess you could think of it as a story board of your ideas". I mentioned my previous life as a storyboard artist and we all had a chuckle.

Clearly, pre-visualization has remained part of the way I work, many of things I make at school come out of that cinematographic understanding of relationships built over a series of frames; the story board returns over and over. This video walks that line between real and synthetic with such intense acumen that it remains visually relevant 20 years later. I think this is only possible because the drawn portion commits to a stylistic representation that has it's goal the representation of motion, not of reality, the lack of "rendering" keeps the video from having to compete with current representational modes.

On another note, the hyper-literalization of the video content is obviously funny but also expresses the recent societal trend to treat abstract thinking and association as anachronistic and ironic.

North Beach Site Study

2008-09-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

North Beach Site Study from Aaron Taylor Harvey on Vimeo.

Modernism is evil?

2008-09-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

Rear Window experiential model, now with essay!

2008-09-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

A few times a week at CCA a film is mentioned during a critique, 90% of the time it is either Rear Window or Blade Runner, these two films have entrenched themselves into architectural pedagogy and not just at CCA. Looking through texts on the Rear Window film-architecture connection, Juhani Pallasmaa's essay The Geometry of Terror is the most cited source. His approach is methodical and pragmatic (for this kind of writing), although the essay is vast in its scope I focus on the acute set analysis performed in the essay.

He starts by drawing an inferred plan of Jeff Jeffries apartment. Using this essentially architectural tool to began constructing the psycho-spacial geometry to which the title refers. It is a strange place: dysfunctional to inhabitation but hyper-functional to narration. There is no bathroom in the apartment of the protagonist, Jeff Jeffries, and the bedroom is never witnessed onscreen. The limitations of the space to facilitate the privileged position of the male/spectator /viewer-gaze is fascinating but the nuanced un-reality of the set continues outside his apartment. The world of rear window is at most 1/2 block, it a place entirely defined by the scope of Jeffries' vision. Hitchcock makes no attempt to connect this segmented stage of action to the world beyond. By diagramming the space of the film Pallassmaa reveals our total ignorance as to how the apartments are entered what Jeffries building looks like and even the existents of cross streets; all of this just becomes poche in the world of Rear Window. "The block of apartments in the film is like a tree lifted from its roots without access to ground water"[1] The distortions also occur within the rooms of the adjacent apartment as they must become artificially flat and distorted all in service of the camera within Jeffries' room. It is a world not just understood through a single vantage point but created by it.

Gilles Deleuze writes in Cinema 1: The Movement Image on the notion of framing: "We will call the determination of a closed system, a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the image - sets, characters, and props - framing."[2] He goes on to include the delineation of sub-sets within the closed system (data-set) and essentially the orchestration of these sub-sets as a information system communicating data to the viewer; "the glowing cigarette end in the black rectangle of the window in Rear Window"[3] This discussion of sets, datum and stage, develops into a discussion of the "out-of-field" a concept which (not surprisingly) seems to connote many things but is primarily concerned with the set's relation to the "whole" (the amorphous continuum of everything, a thread on which the set sits and represents a "duration"). Deleuze states that with Hitchcock "the frame confines all the components"[4] , and for this reason, perhaps counter-intuitively, that unseen whole becomes ever more significant. Here in the contained universe of Rear Window the very little that remains veiled is the narrative hinge on which the story swings. Through Jeff Jeffries and his telephoto lens we are trying to connect to the next set up, to understand our duration in the whole and escape the claustrophobia of containment.

There is no "exterior" in Rear Window only a configuration of stacked interiors within a larger interior; sub-sets within a set tenuously rwa cinematic idea."^{^[5]}, but I can't imagine a more concise diagram of the Deleuzian conception of framing or the potentials of designed voyeurism.

[1] Pallasmaa, J. (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto, p.155

[2] Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.12

[3] Deleuze p. 13

[4] Deleuze p. 16

[5] Truffaut, F. (1984) Hitchcock London: Paladin Grafton Books, p. 324

Movie: Price Center UCSD

2008-08-14T14:40:00.001-07:00

Turn on your speakers or put on your headphones then press play.

If you are committed to quality (I know you are) please download the full resolution file here.

2008-07-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

Cinemathequetonics is more than visual.

I have spent many months now trying to parse my interst and make it essentially theoretical but I'm starting to lean towards a kind of techno-pragmatism that has everything to do with production and pre-visualization. Cinema is effective in it's ability to conmbine modalities into a single expression. Cinema is the framing of life forcebaly reduced for effect, so is architecture. This has always been true and that is why any building could be anylazed and analogized in cinematic terms, so then the struggle (my struggle) is to understand how the tools of film can actually produce new architectural experiences or effects not just help explain them. And here is where the pragmatist enters; technology has allowed us to create elaborate 3d models of architecture but there has been such a rush to define the goals of this technology that we may have slipped right past the true potential.... A 3d model can become the deep soil in which a rich concept is planted.

Why is the model seen primarily as sculpture laid atop the undulating topographies of virtual space? The model instead can allow a pre-realized experience. Not just imagery but sound, association, memory, the quasi-haptic realms of motion pictures (citation). This seems obvious, perhaps it is, but somewhere along the Lynn-Denari-Hadid ladder it seems to have been lost and once again

Cinema achieves an immense silmotaneity utilizing very simple effects: the coss-cut provides an instant shift of time and place but maintains the given spacio-narrative of a film. It is in the distinction that a whole is created.

Book List (on-going):

2008-07-21T15:35:00.001-07:00

Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today

by Brian McGrath (Paperback - June 15, 2007)

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

By Juhani Pallasmaa

Contributor Steven Holl

Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2005

ISBN 0470015799, 9780470015797

80 pages

Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

By Anthony Vidler

Published by MIT Press, 2000

ISBN 0262720418, 9780262720410

301 pages

Cinema 1: The Movement-image

By Gilles Deleuze, Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam

Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 1986

ISBN 0816613990, 9780816613991

264 pages

Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial : Eisenman Architects, 1988-1998

By Andrew E. Benjamin, Cynthia Davidson, Peter Eisenman, K. Michael Hays, John Rajchman

Contributor Andrew E. Benjamin, Cynthia Davidson, Peter Eisenman, K. Michael Hays, John Rajchman

Published by Monacelli Press, 2003

ISBN 1580930492, 9781580930499

334 pages

Gyroscopic Horizons: Prototypical Buildings and Other Works

By Neil M. Denari

Published by Princeton Architectural Press, 1999

ISBN 187827113X, 9781878271136

224 pages

Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia

By Francois Penz, Maureen Thomas

Published by British Film Institute, 1997

ISBN 0851705782, 9780851705781

212 pages

Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

By Linda Krause, Patrice Petro

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2003

ISBN 0813532760, 9780813532769

213 pages

Cinema and Architecture: Towards Understanding the Cinematic Sense of Place and Its Relationship to the Built Environment

By Julie Drapkin Dercle

Published by University of California at Berkeley, 1992

902 pages

AD: Cinema & Architecture II

Architecture and Film: Publications

By Mark Lamster

Contributor Mark Lamster

Published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2000

ISBN 1568982070, 9781568982076

254 pages

Parallax

By Steven Holl

Published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2000

ISBN 1568982615, 9781568982618

350 pages

The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema

By Juhani Pallasmaa

Published by Rakennustieto, 2001

ISBN 9516826288, 9789516826281

183 pages

Architectures of Illusion: From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments

By Maureen Thomas, François Penz

Contributor Maureen Thomas, François Penz

Published by Intellect Books, 2003

ISBN 1841500453, 9781841500454

192 pages

Good Links

2008-07-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

AMAZONIAN BOOK LIST

Sci-fi city

Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los Angeles - endless cinema or private telematics

linked hybrid

Student essay: http://www.uark.edu/rd_vcad/urel/publications/inquiry/2004/1699.htm

Nice series of set/location images+info: http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=142

Someone else's thesis (good times): http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/mellin/arch671/winter2000/sdarali/films/arch_film.htm

harvard film series : http://studentgroups.gsd.harvard.edu/filmarch/2002spring.html
http://studentgroups.gsd.harvard.edu/filmarch/

Discussion: http://www.designcommunity.com/discussion/6146.html

Waterloo U Course: http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/faculty_projects/terri/484_film_allmovies.html

MIT Course: http://www.lukez.com/teaching/fall1999studio/fall1999studio_description.htm\

Yale Course: http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/352

Yale Descrip: http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=Architecture_Film_Society_Spring2007

SCI-FI Locations: http://www.oobject.com/category/15-scifi-movies-15-famous-architectural-locations/

University of Sydney Course: http://www.usyd.edu.au/research/opportunities/opportunities/565

Hammer Event I will miss: http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/calendar_full_Sep_2008.htm

Remterview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,566655,00.html

Bldg Blog: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/film-fest-cometh.html

Another Blog: http://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/filmarchitecture/index.html

essay: http://www.mustekala.info/node/44

essay: http://www.ghi-dc.org/competingmodernities/e_film.cfm

2008-06-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

Sequence
Framing
interpolation
cross-cut
montage
long shot
mise en scene
dissolve...

Howabout dissolve? It is a term meaning the slow transition between two scenes through the fading of one into the other without an intermediate change to black or white (my def.). Can architecture do this? That is what "transparency" is to some degree discussing. Or Eisenman in his book "Blurred Zones". Of course this is actually a literal impossibility but if one is going to consider the cross-cut or the Eisensteinian juxtaposition maybe one needs to also look at the less abrupt counterpart in film-editing. I was thinking about it today while riding my bike home from a fruitless trip to the glasses store –I may need to enter Denari's first Global Surface to find what I really need– perhaps it stemmed from that very consideration as the global surface does to some degree dissolve the otherwise abrupt understanding of spacial transition. Oh, but our credit in ribbon has been over-spent, there must be other ways.

tron

2008-03-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

With a myriad of visualization options lo-fi ambition lives on in the mold of Gondry. So many layers of visual (anachronistic) irony here...

Tron
by freres-hueon

Taiwan: driving and watching.

2008-03-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

Swoopy roof at the old Taiwan intl.

2008-03-21T18:27:00.000-07:00

Farmer's market Hong Kong

2008-03-21T18:24:00.001-07:00

HK fashion friends

2008-03-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

HK HADID

2008-03-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

Foriegn land awesome b-day

2008-03-18T19:26:00.001-07:00

Old street market

2008-03-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

Taipei international

2008-03-14T15:49:00.001-07:00

overstated connections at SFO

2008-03-07T15:22:00.001-08:00

WIP for studio and Indie-Study:

2008-03-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

It seems that the potential for cinema and architecture lies in the cross phased time of multi-modal movement. That in fact the reading of place can change significantly with the nature of transportation. The car forces a kind of broad generalization of form through an extended long shot that moves monolithic objects closer and closer into view and/or it causes a blurring of proximity as our eyes can't pull focus fast enough on adjacent conditions. Walking creates an alternate understanding, pulling us into almost constant close-up. The broad understanding of space gets lost as we can't see the forest for the trees (or the city for the buildings, as it were). These two understandings can often be contrapuntal leading to a disjunctive gestalt. The city provides a multivalent presentation of "self" and forces us to constantly reposition our understanig of place.

mini-manifesto

2008-03-07T13:12:00.001-08:00

2008-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

This was the first film of my self-hosted film series in Timken Hall at CCA in San Francisco.

2008-03-07T00:12:00.000-08:00

Cinema an architecture are best friends, I'll tell you why soon.