Slicing Spaces: Performance of Architecture in Cinema


Book Description

As suggested in the title, Slicing Spaces: Performance of Architecture in Cinema, this project slices through the multifaceted layers of film space. The text investigates how architecture performs as an altruist, proving that environed space is not merely a backdrop in film scenes, but an active performing character. The performance of architecture varies depending on what the filmmakers wish the viewer to feel, whether it is fear, compassion or joy. Considerations take an interdisciplinary approach, not solely observing film and architecture but also studying the likes of urbanism, politics, philosophy, history, psychology, art and design. The substantial spectrum of opinions from contributing authors allows the reader to absorb the diverse relationships of architecture in cinema, inviting the reader to form their own opinions on the topic and inspiring a new way of thinking. Slicing Spaces explores the interconnected relationship between architecture and film via distinct approaches to spaces of the city, confinement, actuality, the psyche and the imagination. Diverse views on cinematic architecture are probed, such as the psychological ramifications of film architecture, the portrayals of the city as a character and the potentials of exploring fantastic places in film. Overall, the book focuses on the authoritative contribution of architecture to the realm of filmmaking. It uncovers a path to look at lived spaces of architectural design from an alternative perspective, be it interiors, buildings or cities. Utilising the architectural ingenuity of drawings and graphics, the collection takes the reader on a visual journey as well as one through narratives.




Creating Sensory Spaces


Book Description

Creating Sensory Spaces celebrates spaces enlivened with sensual richness and provides you with the knowledge and tools necessary to create them. Drawing on numerous built case studies in ten countries and illustrated with over 85 full color images, the book presents a new framework for the design of sensory spaces including light, color, temperature, smell, sound, and touch. Bridging across disciplines of architecture, engineering, phenomenology and perceptual psychology, this book informs the design of buildings and neighborhoods that reclaim the role of the body and all the senses in creating memorable experiences of place and belonging.




Expanded Cinema


Book Description

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.




The Language of Architecture


Book Description

DIVLearning a new discipline is similar to learning a new language; in order to master the foundation of architecture, you must first master the basic building blocks of its language – the definitions, function, and usage. Language of Architecture provides students and professional architects with the basic elements of architectural design, divided into twenty-six easy-to-comprehend chapters. This visual reference includes an introductory, historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines./divDIV /divDIVWhether you’re new to the field or have been an architect for years, you’ll want to flip through the pages of this book throughout your career and use it as the go-to reference for inspiration, ideas, and reminders of how a strong knowledge of the basics allows for meaningful, memorable, and beautiful fashions that extend beyond trends./divDIV /divDIVThis comprehensive learning tool is the one book you’ll want as a staple in your library./divDIV /div




Saul Bass


Book Description

Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men. The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public. This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design—a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.




The Cinema of Tarkovsky


Book Description

The phenomenon of time was a central preoccupation of Tarkovsky throughout his career. His films present visions of time by temporal means - that is, in time. Tarkovsky does not represent time through coherent argument, Nariman Skakov proposes, rather he presents it and the viewer experiences the argument. This book explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from Ivan's Childhood (1962) to Sacrifice (1986). Dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries and delusions are phenomena which present alternative spatio-temporal patterns; they disrupt the linear progression of events and create narrative discontinuity. Each chapter is dedicated to the discussion of one of Tarkovsky's seven feature films and in each, one of these phenomena functions as a refrain. Skakov discusses the influence of the flow of and lapses in space and time on the viewer's perception of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe. He opens and closes his original and fascinating book on Tarkovsky's cinema by focusing on the phenomenon of time that is discussed extensively by the filmmaker in his main theoretical treatise Sculpting in Time, as well as in a number of interviews and public lectures.




Contemporary Architects


Book Description

" To strengthen the contemporary focus of this volume, we have added about forty architects and have deleted some whose activity ceased before World War II. In making these decisions, we have been assisted by an Advisory Board. As in the first volume, we have continued to define the word "architect" very broadly, so as to include planners, theorists, structural engineers, and landscape architects whose work seems to be central to the enterprise of creating habitable spaces in our day." --Editor's note.




The Film Sense


Book Description

A renowned Soviet director discusses his theory of film as an artistic medium which must appeal to all senses and applies it to an analysis of sequences from his major movies.




The Production of Space


Book Description

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.




Architecture and Narrative


Book Description

Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. This intriguing book explores the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings.