Watch This Space

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.