Cinematic Aided Design ─ An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life.

The everyday life is one the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. We move through our everyday environment in a state of distraction, as once remarked by Benjamin, and suffer from a form of double blindness. On the other hand, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence – a largely ignored and untapped resource. Films are ‘equipment for living’, they help us to understand architecture as experience while also providing an accelerated education in lived situations. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.

Francois Penz is Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image at the University of Cambridge where he directs the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualization and Communication. His research focuses along three main axis: cinematic aided design (injecting a form of cinematic intelligence in the architectural design process), urban cinematics (understanding complex urban phenomena through the film medium) and the museum of the future (how new technologies, at the intersections of material and digital culture, make our cultural heritage more interesting and engaging). His current AHRC research project, ‘A cinematic musee imaginaire of spatial cultural differences’ (2017-2020), expands many of the ideas developed in this book to other cultures (China and Japan in particular), construing films of everyday life as a revelator of deep spatial cultural differences. He is the Director of The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies and the co-director of the Cambridge – Nanjing Research Centre on Architecture and Urbanism. He is a Fellow of Darwin College.