Seeing is making. Film as argument for design

Abstract

The present paper reviews, as a case study, the use of films, short films and audiovisual documentaries as arguments and references for desing assignments in early design studios at the school of architecture. Out of this fruitful experience the goal is not so much to review and verify the well-known synergies between film and architecture but to methodologically emphasize the importance of endowing the student in his first steps of design practice with realistic and feasible referential support —through the visual— that could help him to realize the yearnings of realism to which every project aspires. The simulacrum of the project finds an ally in the realistic fiction of the movie. The film-architecture association is thus placed at the service, as a medium not as an end, of learning and design methodology.