Visual Arts

Gordon Cullen's Serial Vision: A Cinematic Urban Theory
During his long and various career as an architect urban planner consultant and editor of the Architectural Review Gordon Cullen (1914 - 1994) developed innovative and original urban visions.
Despite that not many studies have been conducted on him his projects numerous sketches or his personal vision about Townscape. This paper addresses this lacuna offering in particular a thorough analysis of a never-published series of sketches part of the Gordon Cullen Archive held at the University of Westminster.
Focusing on this suggesting sequence of images this paper will investigate in particular Cullen's original approach describing properly the serial vision as unique cinematic method that he implemented to express and successfully represent the complexity of urban spaces. The main aim is to re-evaluate Cullen's contribution in relation to the seminal urban research of the 50s 60s and 70s stating his crucial role in influencing the contemporary development of urban theories.

Mediatic Umbraculum – Architecture, Cinema, and Multimedia Systems
We live in a world enclosed by images. This is a phenomenon that has been much debated and documented across disciplines for over a century in the age of film television and internet. Today the digital production of images and our screenbased interaction on hand held and laptop devices has become what we may call the defining characteristic of today's spatial and interpersonal experiences. This paper sets out work being done by GIRAC (the Research Group in Architecture and Cinema) at the University of Valladolid Spain on how this manifests itself in architectural design and theory and how it results in a new approach to our understanding of architecture and by extension the city. It is a new hybrid mediaarchitecture approach that we argue more fully exploits the contemporary phenomenological potential of our new media saturated environments and results in new forms of spatial design practice

Watch This Space
Exploring Cinematic Intersections Between the Body, Architecture, and the City
This book and its individual essays examine key emerging and evolving practices theories and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines such as architecture interior and urban design and film and moving image studies more broadly.
The collection is an exploration of the evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric connecting spatial design disciplines like architecture and urban design with film and moving image studies. It is premised on the argument that the understanding of ‘space’ in these areas continues to draw on each other’s fields of reference and that in recent times this has expanded further to the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art cultural studies and art practice to name but three. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of ‘space’ in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.
It engages with this evolving set of ideas and underlines how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporate tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations and film makers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which by definition is complex eclectic occasionally contradictory and at times characterised by surprising confluences.
Conceived as a form of mapping of these confluences and contradictions this book collects varied essays that in their own unique ways explore the diversity of how we today define understand and engage with notions of the body in architectural-urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema and concludes with ‘experimental spatial’ projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines broadening architectural urbanist media and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies that engage with their subjects by means of novel techniques i.e. employing graphic software for an analysis of pre-digital films deconstructing cinematography in modernist classics or researching urban edgelands via collaging and montage etc.

Are We Still Connected? Contemporary Chinese Minority-Centred Films and the Depiction of Interdependent Relations between Dwellers, Settlements, and Living Circumstances
Chinese ethnic minority-themed cinema reflects and portrays the diverse living situations of modern non-Han Chinese. The indigenousness of ethnic minorities gives primitiveness to gazing at a complex triangle of interconnections among the inhabitants the exotic environment and the nowness the representation of relationships is more variable affected by the vicissitudes of society. The chapter interprets different emotional connections between minority locals and the settlements/ground with exemplary works. It attributes these relations to cultural geographical concepts the topophilia and other forms of topobased affection and ir includes four patterns: First the settlement of ethnic minorities as a destination for escapism and change; second the settlement of the minority as a territory where various disputes of oldness and newness are encountered; third the settlement of ethnic minorities as a traumatized land creates anxiety; fourth ethnic minority settlements serve as a platform for folkloric and ethnic cultural performances.
