‘reports given by Images’ – Film as a Critical Medium for Architectural Interiority

"Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images" (Sontag 153). The computer has fast eclipsed manual drawing as the prime source of architectural representation in architectural schools. Studios are relinquishing drawing boards, and students spend long hours in dark computer laboratories, alienated from light and the awareness of passing time. While digital media have opened up new possibilities of experiential, real-time and interactive forms, its new animated form is distinct from the tradition of established moving image narratives, such as film. The narrative traditions, privileged in conventional computer architecture, frequently render the interior lifeless, objective and emotionally distant. They deny the point of occupation where architectural "circulation" becomes interior design's "lifestyle," and where architectural "durability" is challenged by the surface alterations and changes inflicted by habitation. This is also the point where the volatility of time (as fashion, and the consequences of moving through and living in space) impacts. Time and change are concerns for fashion-conscious interiors rather than for the timelessness stereotypically associated with architecture. It is this particular affinity with time (deformation, wear, fashion) which suggests a critical need for representations of the interior of architecture to assertively engage with time-based and strategically subjective representational media. The paper hence argues a need to assertively deploy film as a representational strategy which actively engages the less measurable aspects of habitation.