Teaching to understand the urban sensorium in the digital age: lessons from the studio

Corresponding author:

Rafael E. [email protected].

edu.au

nderstand the urban
Teaching to usensorium in the digital age: lessonsfrom the studio
Rafael E. Pizarro, Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning, The

University of Sydney, 148 City Road, Wilkinson Building G04, Sydney,

NSW 6000, Australia

This paper proposes a cinematic technique-based method for teaching urban

design studios to improve students’ appreciation of the connection between the

human cognitive-sensorial system (the human sensorium) and the environmental

qualities of public spaces (the urban sensorium). Students learn how to do street

analysis by way of flaneurie and using audioevideo devices; how to use

cinematic storyboarding as part of the design process; and how to present the

final project as a movie (in addition to a physical model and drawings). A

pedagogical goal of the studio is to sharpen the designer’s mental and cognitive

skills necessary to establish sensorial relationships between people and the built

environment, and to present such relationships in the optimum media.

� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: urban design, design education, design methods, design tools, film

Theominous environmental changes accredited to global warming seem

to have reawakened sensibilities about the connection between the hu-

man sensoryeperceptual system and the environment that surrounds

it. Yet design students do not seem any more aware of these connections

than they have been in the past. Indeed, critiques by design theorists since

the 1970s (Tuan, 1977; Lynch, 1981; Lefebvre, 1991; Motloch, 1991; Roszak,

1993; Roszak et al., 1995; Kahn, 1995) still to apply to current architectural

and urban design projects in schools of design. In The Eyes of the Skin, for ex-

ample, Pallasmaa (2005) tells us how he has become ‘increasingly concerned

about the bias towards vision, and the suppression of other senses, in the

way architecture [is] conceived, taught and critiqued, and about the conse-

quent disappearance of sensory and sensual qualities from the arts and archi-

tecture’ (ibid. p. 10). Further, Pallasmaa tells us how

‘. many aspects of the pathology of everyday architecture today can . be

understood through an analysis of the epistemology of the senses, and a cri-

tique of the ocular bias of our culture at large, and of architecture in par-

ticular. The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be

understood as the consequence of the negligence of the body and the senses

www.elsevier.com/locate/destud

0142-694X $ - see front matter Design Studies 30 (2009) 272e286

doi:10.1016/j.destud.2008.09.002 272� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/destud

Teaching to understand

.. The growing experiences of alienation, detachment and solitude in the

technological world today, for instance, may be related with a certain pa-

thology of the senses’ (2005, p. 18e19).

Indeed, it seems that students continue to place emphasis on the visual qual-

ities of their design projects offering little insight into their understanding of

the project’s sensorial aspects. Such lack of understanding is reflected in the

production of architectural and urban design projects of stunning visual qual-

ities e marvellous facades, impressive volumes and building massing, great

colours, perspectives and vistas lavishly presented in large format glossy pa-

per e but displaying no evident understanding of the sensual attributes of ar-

chitectural or urban spaces. The introduction of digital technologies in design

studios in the 1980s, which have helped visualise and understand quickly and

easily design aspects such as spatial relations between buildings and to antic-

ipate solar exposure, shadows, and wind effects on a building or a street, for

example, have not helped to increase awareness of a project’s sensorial as-

pects. In fact, the opposite seems true. ‘Digital design’ has seemingly contrib-

uted to perpetuate the proverbial barrier between classroom learning and the

‘real world’ (see Boyer, 1996). In the words of Pallasmaa, ‘computer imaging

tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic

capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual

manipulation, a retinal journey’ (2005, p. 12). While studio instruction is

geared towards training students to deal with a world of ‘bricks-and-mortar,’

the time they spend in front of computer, mobile-phone and TV screens seems

to make them ever more detached from the world of the senses, thus widening

the gap between the reality of ‘bits’ and that of ‘bricks.’ No doubt, the con-

stant dwelling of students in the virtual world of video games, podcasts,

video-mobile phones, email, and television has contributed to this desensitisa-

tion.1 It seems that the primary aesthetic goal in students’ designs is the pleas-

ing of the visual at the expense of other senses (Lynch, 1960, 1981; Neisser,

1967; Berger, 1977; Tuan, 1977; Ackerman, 1990; Pallasmaa, 2005). The

exclusive emphasis on the visual often becomes evident when someone visits

a built project e a building or public space e that they have so admired in the

glossy pages of a magazine only to be disheartened by the poverty of its sen-

sorial attributes: the place is either too hot, too cold, too windy, too noisy, it

smells bad, it is too long to walk, or simply it just does not feel right.2

The concern about the sensorial qualities of urban environments is not new

and, indeed, it has a long tradition among urban theorists such as Lynch

(1981), who spoke often about the ‘sensuous city’ (Lynch, 1981; Banerjee

and Southworth, 1995). But it is Phenomenology, as conceived by Husserl

and advanced by Merleau-Ponty (1962), what sets the foundations for a sen-

sory-aware urban design theory focused on environmental perception and

place cognition, and as articulated scholars such as Holl et al. (2006), Motloch

(1991), Norberg-Schulz (1993), Abram (1996), Pallasmaa (2005) and Tuan

the urban sensorium in the digital age 273

274

(1977). Their argument is for a different ‘vision’ in understanding environmen-

tal settings as intertwined tangible and intangible entities full of meaning, that

must be read as patterns and wholes rather than individual and isolated pieces.

The Urban Sensorium Studio proposed in this paper intends to address the

above problems by reestablishing a coterminous and dialectic between the

very real city of bricks and a sensorially explored ‘city of bits’ (Mitchell,

1996; Boyer, 1996).

1 The Urban Sensorium StudioThe Urban Sensorium Studio is designed to increase awareness in design stu-

dents of the connection between the human sensorium (the sensory components

of the brain and nervous system that deal with the receiving and interpreting of

external stimuli) and urban environments. The studio aims at negotiating the

tension that underlies the daily life of students between the ‘real’ and the ‘vir-

tual.’ To this end, a pedagogical objective of the studio is to sharpen the de-

signer’s mental and cognitive skills necessary to establish such relationships.

The studio also introduces students to a method for capturing the sensorial

qualities of the built environment e the urban sensorium e to help them expe-

rience first-hand the sensuous qualities of a city.

The studio achieves these objectives in two ways: by teaching students how to

do urban analysis by way of flaneurie (Benjamin 1985, 1999); a method to cap-

ture the feel of life in the streets by drafting reflective essays on-site and by re-

cording street life on film and audio clips. And, by having students producing

a final design project presented in the form of a film complete with a narrative,

actors and soundtrack, and accompanied by a textual description of ‘a day in

the life’ of a person in that project.

In the studio, the indissoluble notions of urban sensorium, as a way to concep-

tualise urban environments, and of aesthetics, as a goal of urban design, are

essential. Although the term urban sensorium has been used in similar contexts

(Buck-Morss, 1991; Goonewardena, 2005; Friedberg, 2006), here I use it to

signify the plethora of sensorial stimuli people receive from the built environ-

ment to fix their position psychologically, emotionally and physically in the

world. In the sensorium of a street, for example, its environmental qualities

are not limited to its visual attributes such as colours, textures and form but

to other less tangible attributes such as noise, sound, temperature, humidity,

odours, and even the unexplainable feeling of empathy or antipathy people

might experience towards that street. A premise of the studio is that by neglect-

ing such attributes we neglect the very aesthetic base of urban design; aes-

thetics as a discourse of the body. In the words of Terry Eagleton, aesthetics

. refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aesthesis would sug-

gest, to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to

Design Studies Vol 30 No. 3 May 2009

Teaching to understand the

the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought. The distinction which the

term ‘‘aesthetic’’ initially enforces in the mid-eighteenth century is one .

between the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts,

sensations and ideas, that which is bound up with our creaturely life as op-

posed to that which conducts some shadowy existence in the recesses of the

mind. It is . the whole of our sensate life togetherdthe business of affec-

tions and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory sur-

faces, of that which takes roots in the gaze and the guts and all that arises

from our most banal, biological insertion into the world (Eagleton, 1990 in

Goonewardena, 2005, p. 48).

2 Cinematic techniques and the studio projectsThe literature on the city in film (Burgess and Gold, 1985; Zonn, 1990; Aitken

and Zonn, 1994; Massood, 1995; Shiel and Tony, 2001) explains how people’s

imagery of cities is greatly informed by that medium (Beauregard, 1993; Leigh

and Kenny, 1996; Pizarro, 2005). By virtue of the constant exposure to the

digital, design students already experience the world in a way that is similar

to the way cinema represents reality: as simultaneous, non-linear, juxtaposed,

fragmented, and experienced by bits. Thus, it seemed logical to me to offer

design students a studio where movie-making techniques were used as integral

part of the design process. After all, the ‘make believe’ medium of cinema,

more than other media, represents quite realistically the environment where

people (and students) play out their lives (Pizarro 2002, 2005).

Themethod proposed in this paper was applied to two studio projects on urban

regeneration sites in Sydney, Australia. The projects were theUrban Sensorium

Park-Museum sited on the former East Darling Harbour container terminal

(aka ‘Hungry Mile’ or ‘Barangaroo’), an 11-hectare former stevedore harbour

slated for redevelopment in 2010, and theWhite Bay EcoCity sited on theWhite

Bay/Glebe Island imported motor vehicle- and dry cargo-terminal. The brief

for the Urban Sensorium Park-Museum included the design of a public park

and a Sensorium Urban Laboratory devoted to studying the interaction be-

tween urban environments and human emotions. The brief called for the design

of sense-scapes (soundscapes, smellscapes, tactilescapes, tastescapes, cromo-

scapes, and cronoscapes) where the emotional state of visitors would be altered

by way of stimulating their human sensorium. The brief for the second project,

the White Bay EcoCity, called for an urban design response to climate change

and how the design of cities to mitigate and adapt to global warming (see pro-

ject at www.ecocitylab.org on the link Ecocity Design Studio).

In addition tomodels and plans, the final presentations for both studios included

a ‘day in the life’ short film illustrating daily activities of residents in the projects.

A combination of still photographs, moving images, fly-through digital models,

sound, music, text, and voice-over enriched the movie-project presentations.

urban sensorium in the digital age 275

http://www.ecocitylab.org

276

The studio work is divided in two parts comprising five stages explained below.

However, before starting the studio project proper, students engage in prelimi-

nary exercises to introduce them to the notion of the urban sensorium. To

awaken the students’ cognitive and sensory skills they had to write short essays

putting into words the relationship between their human sensorium and a partic-

ular urban sensorium. For example, they have to describe frommemory the sen-

sorium of a specific place (a street, a park, a public square) and then visit the site

to verify the accuracy of their reflections. In another exercise, students analyse

the urban sensorium in a music-video of their choice that contains street scenes

and try to explain the real environmental conditions of the scene watched. An-

other exercise most enjoyed by students is going to a busy commercial street, lis-

tening in silence for 20 min, and writing in detail every sound they hear including

its source, pitch, volume and duration, and then reading aloud to their class-

mates their analysis. The five stages of the studio are as follows:

Stage 1. Sensing the urban sensorium via cinematic flaneurie (site analysis)

Stage 2.Cinematic exploration of the human sensorium in space (sense-

spaces)

Stage 3. Textual project design

Stage 4. Conceptual cinematic essays of discrete parts of the projects

Stage 5. Final project: cinematic urban design

2.1 Stage 1: Sensing the urban sensorium via cinematicflaneurie3 (site analysis)In this exercise, students are asked to leisurely stroll along a busy commercial

street during daytime and nighttime to capture the sensorium of that street

(sounds, smells, climate conditions, social milieu, but also how the feel of

the street). In the videoeaudio recording (using videocams, mobile phones

or a digital camera in movie-mode) students are asked to capture the spaces

and activities of the street as well as the ‘in-betweenness’ of the urban environ-

ment; that unassailable milieu that develops in the interstices of the main

spaces in a city between buildings where ‘space takes . the form of relations

among sites’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 23) (students often fail to represent the tran-

sition between spaces when illustrating their architectural or urban design pro-

jects). In this exercise students also learn that capturing and representing the

ephemeral nature of events in public spaces is as critical to city design as is cap-

turing the more static event-spaces usually represented in their two-dimen-

sional images.4 In the weekly feedback about studio work, a student from

the first studio wrote about this exercise:

‘I sometimes fall into the trap of imagining and designing just for the mo-

ment, a snapshot. This method forces me to appreciate time. It also helps

me to visualize the in-between spaces as well as the ‘‘main’’ spaces because

you are forced to consider, and describe, the path between in between in as

much detail as the main areas.’



The Studio uses Walter Benjamin’s and Charles Baudelaire’s notion of

flaneurie as the method for street-life analysis and the video camera as the

flaneur’s ‘tool’ to capture the urban milieu. Given the difficulty and height-

ened sensibility needed to capture an urban sensorium (not just the measurable

phenomena such as temperature, humidity or noise but the more nuanced in-

tricacies of urban street life), flaneurie arises as the perfect method to develop

a phenomenological understanding of urban environments.5 After all, the fla-

neur is ‘the botanist of the sidewalk’ (Baudelaire), the detached pedestrian ob-

server of the metropolis, the analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric that

‘though grounded in everyday life, is an analytic form, a narrative device,

an attitude towards knowledge and its social context’ (Jenks, 1995, p. 148).

In the words of Benjamin, the flaneur is

‘not only a lifestyle but an analytical tool. The flaneur derives pleasure

from the hustle and bustle of the city streets. The flaneur moves among

the crowd with the eye of an artist. .. The flaneur is the stroller, the pe-

destrian who derives pleasure and feels delighted in ambling contentedly

and unhurriedly through the city. To promenade without purpose is the

highest ambition of the flaneur. Walking in the city is its own reward’

(Benjamin, 1999, 417).

For Benjamin, however, the distinctiveness of the flaneur resides precisely in

his/her refusal to become part of the crowd, which is why the author of this

paper has added the adjective cinematic to flaneurie. The cinematic flaneur,

who is always gazing behind the camera, resembles the urban tourist who

films cheerfully e and obsessively e the street life of a new city but does

not belong to the scene filmed. Yet the flaneur is the perfect urban dweller be-

cause he/she derives sensual pleasure from the ‘phantasmagoria,’ from the

‘dazzling urban spectacle’ of the city (Huang, 2000 in Fahmi, 2003, p. 10).

The flaneur ‘can look but not touch, and what he sees is montage, one

snap shot after another. The dream world of the urban spectacle offers the

flaneur no complete narrative; he has to make sense of the fragments by him-

self’ (Shields, 1994, p. 61). The students’ video clips from these exercises re-

flect an understanding of the city ‘as a collection of urban fragments .

(re)sorted, (re)assembled and (re)connected, continually unsettling and dis-

turbing established spatial orders, whilst implying superimposition and inter-

change’ (Fahmi, 2003, p. 9). Paradoxically, however, the flaneurie method

makes possible for the student to develop a more holistic appraisal of the en-

vironment by way examining urban ‘fragments’ and then reassembling them

into ‘whole’ urban scenes in movie clips. In reporting about this exercise in

her weekly feedback to the tutor, one student wrote about this exercise:

‘This assignment made me more aware of the tactile landscapes surrounding

me, andmademe concentrate on sounds, smells, and sensations, more that in

what I was seeing. Vision, of course, was ever present, but the exercise forced

me to think in other terms such as sounds and feel, for example.’


278

In the two studios, the video clips produced in this stage reflected ‘the conflict

between imagination and reality as a driving force for creating and structur-

ing virtual spatial orders, producing images of the city as collections, aggre-

gations, accumulations of patched-up, extendable, overlapping and

developing forms’ (Fahmi, 2003, p. 9). The clips reflected a new aesthetic of

urban cognitive mapping rich in multiple meanings and images (Lynch,

1960; Kitchin and Freundschuh, 2000). This form of ‘cognitive mapping’ al-

lows the student to arrive at a signification of the city through sensorial per-

ception rather than developing just a perceptual knowledge of physical form.

2.2 Stage 2: Cinematic exploration of the human sensoriumin space (sense-spaces)In this exercise, students are asked to explore and represent each sense of the

human sensorium in a 7-min sound-video with the condition that such repre-

sentation not be abstract but inserted within some form of spatial structure. In

the production of these sense-spaces, students recall (and use) their urban ex-

plorations as cinematic flaneurswhere they recorded their sensorial experiences

via images, sounds, hand-drawn sketches and written notes. Then, they trans-

late them into movie clips to evocate the richness of what is being experienced

first-hand. I also encourage students to use a variety of images culled from

their own bank of photographs, video-art pieces, downloaded movie clips,

video games, three-dimensional imaging productions, and from design books

and magazines to use in this exercise. Although in the movie clips it is obvi-

ously impossible to recreate sensory experienced beyond the auditory and

the visual, the sensory stimuli experienced in reality becomes vividly material-

ised in their movie clips. Students reconstructed urban imageries conjuring up

various visual, auditory, olfactory, and verbal impressions (Liddament, 2000

in Fahmi, 2003, p. 6). As one of the students put it, ‘as I went deeper into

the exercise, my senses became more acute to experiencing the day-to-day en-

vironment. . I’ve been able to better appreciate nature . I have widen my

vocabulary beyond using non-descriptive words such as ‘‘nice’’, ‘‘cool’’, or

‘‘great’’ to describe what I experience when observing nature.’ Or, in the words

of another student: ‘I’ve began to see the power of the senses to appreciate life,

to notice subtle things beyond the obvious in the music I listen, in the books I

read, in the films I watch.’

2.3 Stage 3: Textual project designIn this stage, students write an essay describing their journey through the pro-

ject. The purpose of the exercise is to allow for the free exploration of the sen-

sorial and spatial attributes of their projects unconstrained by the technical

limitations of representation (e.g. lack of drafting abilities or of dexterity in

handling digital design software). Here, students are asked to imagine their

projects in the ethereal site of their minds by picturing sensorial and spatial

possibilities in a way that otherwise would be difficult, even impossible, to rep-

resent in any media; they are asked to invent a sensorial world where anything



and everything is possible, yet mindful that those possibilities have to be trans-

lated into real spaces in the final project.

This exercise actually has a long tradition in urban design and, of course, in

literature, and Calvino’s (1979) Invisible Cities is used as textbook to illustrate

examples of cities of the imagination. Other readings used to illustrate such cit-

ies are Callenbach’s (1978) Ecotopia, Le Guin’s (1975) ‘Description of Abbe-

nay’ in The Dispossessed, and Lynch’s (1981) ‘A Place Utopia’ in Good City

Form. By reading these texts students become aware of the power of words

as vehicles to invent cities complete with streets, buildings, new types of

cars, new spaces, and even fantastic things such as new animal species and

types of trees, as well as new social and political organizations.

The objective of the exercise is that students understand that most sensations

in the human sensorium have a spatial dimension just like dreams are always

staged in some form of space (in a particular house, a room in that house,

a field, a street, the sea). The point of the exercise is to make students aware

that, unless a person is clinically blind, it is difficult to envision anything out-

side of space (and, of course, the mental space is one over which people have

full control). The exercise gives students the opportunity to shape their pro-

jects in textual form first, where they are truly free to ‘dream’ them, before

adjusting them to the ‘bricks-and-mortar’ reality of their sites.

2.4 Stage 4: Conceptual cinematic essay of discreteparts of the projectsStage four is a combination of the above two stages but here students start to

combine the textual descriptions of their projects with the images and sounds

they have produced in stage 2. At this point, however, students do not have to

show literal images of how their sense-scapes would look like when they are

finally built but just a general approximation to the final design. For example,

a student would use images of a snowy landscape to illustrate the low-temper-

ature environment to which she wants to expose a visitor in a particular area of

the project. The challenge for the student is to figure out how to re-interpret,

re-design, re-engineer, or scaled-down that snowy landscape (e.g. a snow-

capped mountain) to fit it to the project site. In this exercise, some students

can be very resourceful and imaginative in putting together their video clips.

In the Sensorium Park-Museum project, for example, one student wanted to

recreate the experience of being immersed in a jungle. He used clips of the Am-

azon forest to illustrate her design, and then designed an actual miniature en-

closed tropical forest complete with humidifiers, swamps, and wild animals for

that particular area of her project. Another student who tried to represent

a landscape to evoke intense emotions in the psyche of a visitor chose to repro-

duce a holocaust memorial-like space using images of the Jewish Museum in

Berlin. She described her space as ‘an irregular shaped room, shrouded in

darkness e except for a narrow slither of light from high above e and another


280

gigantic space filled with a maze-like forest of concrete columns of varying

heights and widths forcing individuals to move uncomfortably through the

narrow spaces between columns.’ Another student tried to communicate dif-

ferent bodily sensations such as

‘the sense of balance which I represented by the image of two individuals

balancing on upright wooden posts; the effect of lack of gravity, repre-

sented by the image of the swings and flying through the air; vertigo, rep-

resented by the image of the staircases spiralling above the viewer;

claustrophobia, represented with images of crowd of people tightly packed

in a underground train; anxiety, represented by the image of a pair of

hands and a face pressed eerily against a foggy glass window; comfort/com-

placency, represented by images of a tranquil forest lit by subtle filtered

sunlight.’

I have found that the exercises in this stage of the Urban Sensorium Studio

allow students to produce very imaginative and sensory-rich spaces otherwise

difficult to generate with more traditional representational systems. This exer-

cise was not without problems, however, and some students had difficulty in

translating images of their imagination into video clips:

‘I came to realise the difficulty in expressing the full spectrum of the senses

only in visual and acoustic media, as is only permissible by the sound-

videos. I think the video is a useful tool but it has some obvious limita-

tions. Unlike reality, it is not possible for the viewer to really feel, touch,

or truly experience a space/environment/climate. I think that any medium

of representation has its limitations, and therefore we should not depend

entirely on one medium alone (be it drawings or digital representation,

for example), but on an array of media that would complement one an-

other to represent the different aspects of the design.’

Students then move on to the final stage where they produce the final movie

project by sifting, synthetizing, and assembling all the information and exer-

cises developed in the former four stages.

2.5 Stage 5: Final project: cinematic urban designFor this final phase of the process, the student is asked to picture herself in

a journey through her project as if she was making a movie using her design

as backdrop. The premise for the final project rests on the metaphorical value

of movies as substitutes for real life, just like walking a city street or a building

may resemble moving through the cinematic space of a movie. When people

move about the city, their senses capture the scenery in a piecemeal fashion,

bit by bit. Sometimes it is the view of a particular building what captures peo-

ple’s attention, others it is the long perspective of a street on a straight axis,

but, in general, it is a juxtaposition of short-lived images, sounds, smells and

sensations what forms the final ‘picture’ of an urban space. People may, or

may not, make immediate sense of those short-lived events. And just as people



journeying through a building or an urban district do not always follow pre-

determined paths, students are made aware that designing an urban district

or an architectural project need not be different from imagining the movement

through the actual building or district.

The conceptual background for this stage of the studio is based on the works

of Harvey (1989) and, again, Benjamin (1985). From Harvey, the studio takes

his view of postmodern spatiality as represented in collage/montage where the

city becomes assemblage, bricolage, or pastiche6 as opposed to modernity’s

image of the city as a functional machine (Rowe and Koetter, 1978). From

Benjamin (1985), the studio takes the city that emerges from his travel tales

in One Way Street and Other Writings: ‘a montage of urban images, meant

to be read simultaneously, revealing the discontinuous nature of space, with

its souvenirs and its myriad connections to ‘‘other places’’’(Benjamin, 1985

in Fahmi, 2003, p. 11).

At this stage, students start designing the journey through the project by way

of storyboarding, placing spaces and events in a particular sequence. The se-

quence, however, does not have to follow a linear narrative. Like in movies,

or in reality, urban spaces in the projects are accessed and travelled in different

directions. This aspect of the project is informed by two movies with non-

linear narratives: Run Lola Run (1999) and Irreversible (2002).

Like in previous exercises, students are asked to make available to themselves

every possible visual, aural, and textual resource to stitch, or ‘suture’ (to use

a common cinematic term), images, sounds, and text together to reflect what

they have envisioned in the previous exercises and in the written design essay.

The final product resembles a coherent whole, yet made out of fragments from

previous video clips and connected with a narrative, following the idea that ‘to

narrate’ is to bind together stories, myths, and fantasies within fictional land-

scapes (Fahmi, 2003, p. 10).

3 Conclusions: blurring boundaries between the realand the virtual in design studiosBaudrillard (1993) once claimed that ‘there is no real and no imaginary except

at a certain distance. . ‘‘[R]eality’’ . seems to be a cybernetically organised

continuum of kinetic images, information, and technological artifacts, .’ (in

Boyer, 1994, p. 492). The studio is cognizant of these blurring boundaries be-

tween reality and virtuality and aims at producing projects to occupy the co-

terminous territories between the real and the virtual, between the virtual

urbanity of the information machine and the physical urbanity of the city; a di-

alectic merging the very real city of bricks with a conceptually experienced ‘city

of bits’ (Mitchell, 1996). In doing so, the studio teaches students that good ur-

ban design depends on the symbiotic relationship between humans and their


282

environment; that what we call urban or architectural space is a set of experi-

ences absorbed and interpreted by the human sensorium: our body sensing the

mass of space around us, our skin reacting to changes in temperature and hu-

midity, our psyche responding to sounds, noises, to the sight of other people,

to colours, to building masses. The Urban Sensorium Studio teaches students

that ultimately all this information is simply channelled by the human senso-

rium to our brains to tell us everything we know about the world, about our-

selves, and about ourselves in the world. The final digital movies illustrate not

only the spaces and massing of the projects but a closer approximation to

a truly ‘sensorialised’ environment. The cinematic technique, with its sequenc-

ing of spaces and events make students aware of the importance of time e that

unassailable but inescapable dimension of design e and how time (e.g. how

long it takes to walk a space and how tired we feel at the end of the walk)

can make us experience the same urban space in an entirely different way

(see Deleuze, 1989; Areni, 2006a, b). One of the key lessons from the students

in this studio, expressed in one of the students’ end-of-semester feedback, was

to realise that being physically tired, for example, does detract from the envi-

ronmental quality and the potential pleasurable experience of an otherwise

beautifully designed urban space. Ultimately, the studio makes students aware

of the vital connection between the human body, the mind, and the built envi-

ronment; a relationship often taken for granted by designers.

The studio also makes students reflect on the type of city they are generating,

as the urban environment that resonates with flaneurie is undeniably the dense

pedestrian cosmopolitan city; a city that can be enjoyed by foot, or in the re-

laxed comfort of a bus or a tram. As Chris Jenks puts it, Flaneurie, as an al-

ternative ‘vision’ of the city, with its sedentary mannerism, with its ‘retracing,’

its ‘rubbernecking,’ its ‘taking a turtle for a walk’ is ‘essentially a critical rebuff

to the late-modern politics of speed’ (Jenks, 1995, p. 149).

4 Limitations of the studioA major risk in these studios is that students may be seduced by the music-

video appearance of the different cinematic exercises and end up producing ac-

tual music-videos instead of design projects. There is no doubt that the artistic

nature of the methods used in the studio attracts those students with a strong

inclination towards the visual arts. And some of the clips produced resembled

more art-videos exploring personal feelings than scenes form an urban design

project. Such personal explorations were obvious in some of the products pre-

sented by some students in both studios. A tutor in these studios will need to

walk a fine line between discouraging students from producing such artistic

pieces7 while not limiting their creativity towards the design project. This

risk is illustrated in one of the final feedback comments by a student in the

White Bay Ecocity project where he says that ‘it seems like the video presen-

tations became a contest to see who’s got the best taste in music.’ This same

student also complained that



‘In all of the videos, includingmine, it would’ve been better if we had restricted

theuse of upbeat backgroundmusic to the Sound-scape sectionof our projects.

And had used either the natural sounds of the environment or sound effects

such as the sound of waves, for example, which would reflect the actual sound

in the other sense-scapes. The use of syntheticmusic in certain sense-scapes did

defeat the purpose of experiencing the environment in its natural state.’

An issue that put at a disadvantage some of the students in the studio in re-

lation to others was the lack of knowledge about movie editing and movie-ed-

iting software. The keenest students were eager to learn by themselves and

quickly advanced from simple software such as Windows Movie-Maker to

Adobe Premiere or Final Cut-Pro. But other students were at pains trying

to figure out the technicalities of editing software. As one of the students

wrote in her end-of-semester feedback:

It would’ve been very useful to have had an introductoryworkshop on editing

software . such as Adobe Premier Pro, or WindowsMovie-Maker, or Pho-

toshop etc. Setting up a new file, for instance, requires knowledge of PAL vs.

NTS video format, aspect ratios, frame rates, compression methods, codec’s,

etc., etc. . which I knew nothing about when beginning the studio.

On the other hand, another student did not see the lack of training in such

techniques as a limitation:

I do not feel future students should be discouraged from electing this stu-

dio due to lack of technical knowledge, provided they are willing to learn.

. It was easy for me to learn the basic features of Adobe Premiere within

a week to produce the first assignment.

Of course, such comments and complaints speak directly to the tutor’s limited

knowledge on the technical aspects of filming, producing, and editing movies

and video as he has been trained only as an architect/urban designer. Given

the interdisciplinary nature of most studios, but in particular of this one, the

obvious response to these challenges is to co-teach the studio with another tu-

tor from a department of cinema/TV. The undeniable connection between ar-

chitectural and urban space in movies (Burgess and Gold, 1985; Zonn, 1990;

Aitken and Zonn, 1994; Massood, 1995; Shiel and Tony, 2001) makes such

‘marriage’ almost a logical addendum to the future curricula in faculties of

architecture, urban design and planning.

ReferencesAbram, D (1996) The spell of the sensuous Pantheon, New YorkAckerman, D (1990) A natural history of the senses Vintage, New YorkAitken S C and Zonn L E (eds) (1994) Place, power, situation, and spectacle: a

geography of film Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MarylandAppleyard, D, Lynch, K and Myer, John R (1964) The view from the road MITPress, Mass. USAAreni, C (2006a) Background music as a quasi-clock i.n retrospective duration

judgments, Journal of Perceptual Motor Skills No 102 pp 435e444


284

Areni, C (2006b) When a few minutes sound like a lifetime: does atmospheric mu-sic expand or contract perceived time?, Journal of Retailing Vol 82 No 3 pp189e202Banerjee, T and Southworth, M (1995) City sense and city design: writings and pro-

jects of Kevin Lynch MIT Press, Cambridge, MABaudrillard, J (1993) Hyperreal America (D. Macey, Trans.) Economy and SocietyVol 11 No 1 pp 243e252

Beauregard, R (1993) Voices of decline: the postwar fate of U.S. cities Blackwell,Cambridge, MABenjamin, W (1985) One way street and other writings Verso, London

Benjamin, W (1999) The Arcades project (Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin,Trans.), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed) Prepared on the basis of the German volume,Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA

Berger, J (1977) Ways of seeing Penguin, LondonBoyer, M C (1994) The city of collective memory MIT Press, Cambridge, MABoyer, M C (1996) CyberCities: visual perception in the age of electronic commu-nication Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Buck-Morss, S (1991) The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcadesproject (studies in contemporary German social thought) MIT Press, Cambridge,MA

Burgess J and Gold J (eds) (1985) Geography, the media and popular culture St.Martin’s Press, New YorkCallenbach, E (1978) Ecotopia: a novel about ecology, people and politics in 1999

Pluto Press, LondonCalvino, I (1979) Invisible cities Pan Books, LondonCullen, G (1971) The concise townscape Architectural Press, London

Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2: the time-image (Hugh Tomlinson, Robert Galeta,Trans.) Athlone Press, LondonEagleton, T (1990) The ideology of the aesthetic Blackwell, OxfordFahmi,WS (2003)City inside out(side): postmodern (re)presentations: city narratives

and urban imageries Paper presented at the 2003 Planning Research Conference,Oxford Brookes University (8e10 April). Document accessed in 2006 at <http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/planning/conference/papers%20pdf/fahmi.PDF!>Featherstone, M (1998) The flaneur, the city and virtual public life, Urban StudiesVol 35 Nos 5e6 pp 909e925Foucault, M (1986) Of other spaces, Diacritics Vol 16 No 1 pp 22e27

Friedberg (2006) The virtual window: from Alberti to Microsoft MIT Press, Cam-bridge, MAGoonewardena, K (2005) The urban sensorium: space, ideology and the aestheti-cization of politics, Antipode Vol 37 No 1 pp 46e71

Harvey, D (1989) The condition of postmodernity Blackwell, OxfordHoll, Steven, Pallasmaa, J and Perez-Gomez, A (2006) Questions of perception:phenomenology of architecture (3rd edn) William Stout Publishers, San Francisco

Huang, T (2000) Hong Kong Blue: Flaneurie with the camera’s eye in a phantas-magoric global city, Journal of Narrative Theory Vol 30 No 3 pp 385e402Irreversible (2002) Director Gaspar Noe, Lions Gate

Jenks, C (1995) Watching your step: the history and practice of the flaneur inVisual culture, Routledge, NYKahn, A (1995) Constructing knowledge of site in Defining the urban condition:

accelerating change in the Geography of power, ACSA Press, WashingtonKitchin Ro and Freundschuh S (eds) (2000) Cognitive mapping: past, present andfuture Routledge, LondonLe Guin, U K (1975) The dispossessed Panther, St Albans


http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/planning/conference/papers&percnt;20pdf/fahmi.PDF!

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/planning/conference/papers&percnt;20pdf/fahmi.PDF!


Lefebvre, H (1991) The production of space (chapter 4 From absolute space to ab-stract apace) (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.) Blackwell, OxfordLeigh, N G and Kenny, J (1996) The city of cinema: interpreting urban im-ages on film, Journal of Planning Education and Research Vol 16 No 1 pp

51e55Liddament, Terry (2000) The myths of imagery, Design Studies Vol 21 pp 589e606Lynch, K (1960) The image of the city MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Lynch, K (1981) Good city form MIT Press, Cambridge, MAMassood, P J (1995) Mapping the hood: the genealogy of city space in Boyz N theHood and Menace II Society, Cinema Journal Vol 35 No 2 pp 85e97

Merleau-Ponty, M (1962) Phenomenology of perception (Colin Smith, Trans.)Routledge & Kegan Paul, LondonMitchell, W (1996) City of bits: space, place and the infobahn MIT Press, Cam-

bridge, MAMotloch, J L (1991) Introduction to landscape design Van Nostrand Reinholdt,New YorkNeisser, U (1967) Cognitive psychology Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York

Nolan, P (2004) The cinematic flaneur: manifestations of modernity in the maleprotagonist of 1940s film noir, unpublished PhD dissertation, University ofMelbourne

Norberg-Schulz, C (1993) Concept of dwelling Rizzoli, New YorkPallasmaa, J (2005) The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses Academy Edi-tions, London

Pizarro, R E (2005) Suburbanizing the mind: the hollywood urban imaginariumand the rise of American suburbia in the Colombian Caribbean, unpublishedPhD dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

Pizarro, R (2002) Exporting the dream: hollywood cinema and latin Americansuburbia in Southern California and the world, Praeger, New York, NYRobotham, J (7 December 2006) Health fears as young become screen zombies,Sydney Morning Herald

Rosenau, P M (1992) Post-modernism and the social sciences: insights, inroads, andintrusions Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJRoszak T, Gomes M E and Kanner A D (eds) (1995) Ecopsychology, restoring the

earth healing the mind Sierra Club Books, San FranciscoRoszak, T (1993) The voice of the earth: an exploration of ecopsychology Touch-stone, New York

Rowe, C and Koetter, F (1978) The collage city MIT Press, Cambridge, MARun Lola Run (1999) Director Tom Tykwer, Sonny Pictures ClassicsShiel, M and Tony, F (2001) Cinema and the city: film and urban societies in a globalcontext Blackwell, Oxford

Shields, R (1994) Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on Flanerie in TheFlaneur, Routledge, New YorkThiel, P (1981) Visual awareness and design: an introductory program in conceptual

awareness, perceptual sensitivity, and basic design skills University of WashingtonPress, SeattleTuan, Y (1977) Space and place: the perspective of experience University of Min-

nesota, MinneapolisZonn L (ed) (1990) Place images in media: portrayal, experience, and meaningRowman and Littlefield, Savage, MD

1. ‘Screen zombies’ is the term used by a journalist to refer to kids in the developed world in

reporting on a study on the time children and adolescents spend in front of a digital

screen watching TV, playing computer video games, sending email, looking at the


286

Internet, or speaking on their mobile phones. The study was published in the Journal of

Paediatrics and Child Health (Robotham, 2006).

2. Obviously, the way people perceive the environmental qualities of space is also culturally

constructed. Here I refer to the oft-stark difference between the qualities of a space as

represented in the visual imagery of a magazine and its real qualities when visited in

person.

3. The term ‘cinematic flaneurie’ is also used by Nolan (2004) but in a different context. No-

lan uses the term to refer to the journeying of characters within a movie, not in relation to

the spectator in a movie theatre, as this author uses it. The literature in other disciplines

also uses other adjectives to qualify the noun flaneur such as digital flaneur, electronic fla-

neur, and virtual flaneur (cf Featherstone, 1998).

4. It is puzzling that the notion of ‘serial vision’ in urban design, as postulated by urban

scholars since the 1960s (Appleyard et al., 1964; Cullen, 1971; Lynch, 1981; Thiel,

1981) has not translated sooner into making the use of movie-making techniques more

prominent in design schools. It is worth mentioning, however, Alvaro Siza’s influence

on introducing serial drawing to capture essential elements and experiences of space to

enhance place cognition and design as a standard educational technique in the School

of Architecture at the University of Porto, Portugal.

5. This approach is commonly shared by urban geographers and urbanists. Professor Tridib

Banerjee from the University of Southern California, a former student of Kevin Lynch

and a Lynch scholar himself (Banerjee and Southworth, 1995), believes that ‘it may

not be fully appreciated how flaneurie e or flanerie e is intrinsic to city design, to plan-

ning and pedagogy of place, and to shaping public images of the city’ (in email conver-

sation of May, 2006).

6. My usage of Harvey’s view on contemporary spatiality is not to be taken as reifying his

sometimes ‘skeptic’ stance on the postmodern condition. Rather, and without labelling

myself as ‘post-modernist,’ I use his description of space as offering the possibility of

a more ‘affirmative’ representation of urban environments using a filmic medium (see

Rosenau, 1992, p. 14 for these differences).

7. The student who designed the flyer to advertise one of the two studios presentation to the

rest of the Faculty, for example, used the term ‘Mini-film Festival’ to head the informa-

tion on the flyer!


Documents

Teaching to understand the urban sensorium in the digital age: lessons from the studio