Conceiving Landscape through Film: Filmic Explorations in Design Studio Teaching

This article shows how the media of film can be integrated, explored and can add value to architectural design studios and practice. It elucidates how film may offer an alternative position in architecture, where landscapes and cities are thought, planned and developed in closer relation to their spatial and sensory effects on humans. It underscores that the film camera can work as a kind of amplifier of how we, with our bodies, perceive space and project space.
In the “Landscape Film” Studio at University of Copenhagen the film medium was tested as a combined registration and design tool for a new Nature Park south of Copenhagen. The final studio films and designs show how resonate recordings of sound, time and a bodily presence may simulate an Einfühling that inspires an alternative architecture of relations: the ambient, the changeable and the volatile. They also emphasize that an ability to work with bodily experience in both physical space and abstract design space is strengthened through the exploration of the film medium. Film becomes a 'resonance tool' or 'membrane' for the perceiver and conceiver, and contributes to a greater awareness of a bodily pre-consciousness in architecture.