Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Almost one hundred years ago Walter Benjamin assessed that both film and architecture are art forms perceived in a “state of distraction” in his clear-sighted essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This pandemic year of teaching design through videoconference provides a unique opportunity to analyze the perception of architecture through the moving images of professors’ and students’ teaching and learning windows. The videoconference-based architecture design studio operates simultaneously as the focused, captive-audience exchange of our camera-facing bodies, and as an extreme version Benjamin’s “state of distraction.” This paper analyzes hundreds of hours of recorded architecture design teaching, originally videotaped for practical distance learning reasons, but ultimately useful in understanding how much visualities in film and architecture overlap. Contemporary neurobiological research hypothesizes that our collective consumption of moving images for decades has necessarily affected how we perceive. A year of architecture teaching as moving image making permits analysis of immersive visual modes that straddle the filmic and architectural imagination.