CINEMATIC ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP: ONLINE KEYNOTE LECTURE
FILMING VENICE & SINGAPORE: A SPATIAL ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH
by François Penz, University of Cambridge
Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image
Join us for our online keynote lecture, Filming Venice & Singapore: A Spatial Ethnographical Approach by François Penz on 17 September 2021, Friday, 12nn – 1.30pm CET, 6- .30pm SGT.
Abstract
There are vast libraries of city films that have shaped our collective urban and architectural imagination. Over time, cinema has deposited invisible film layers over cities, charting not just the evolution of the urban fabric, but also the social, cultural and societal changes that took place through the 20th century to the present. Venice and Singapore are not immune to this process and the first part of the lecture will demonstrate how city spaces have been expressed and characterized by filmmakers – eliciting in the process how cinema constitutes a unique form of spatial ethnography. The second part of the lecture will discuss how a practice of moving image constitutes a valid approach to observing and recording city spaces as part of a cinematic aided design urban process.
About the Speaker
François Penz is Professor of Architecture & the Moving Image and Emeritus Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. He has published widely on issues of cinema, architecture and the city, most recently Cinematic Urban Geographies (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and Cinematic Aided Design: an everyday approach to architecture (Routledge in 2018). In 2020 he completed an AHRC research project, ‘A cinematic musée imaginaire of spatial cultural differences’ (2017-2020) that expanded many of the ideas developed in his Routledge book applied to other cultures (China and Japan in particular), construing films of everyday life as a revelator of deep spatial cultural differences and similarities.
The lecture is part of the Cinematic Architecture: Venice and Singapore workshop running from the 17 – 24 September 2021 led in collaboration by the Singapore Pavilion and the University of Cambridge.
