RESEARCH QUESTION What is the role of Virtual Reality technology in transforming the cross-industry relationship between architecture and filmmaking?
INTRODUCTION Venturing into the media industry as an architecture graduate, I often find my past educational background significantly supportive for me in accomplishing new challenges as a media-maker, especially with the skills of creative problem-solving and critical thinking. Joseph Kosinsky, the director of ‘TRON: Legacy’ (2010), shared his similar experience after making the same career shift, breaking into the mainstream with the sci-fi debut (Petrunia 2014). These findings have pointed me to look inwards to my past profession in order to identify and articulate my architectural learnings as an instrument in my future media career. Despite being seemingly different in terms of end products, these two professions share numerous similarities at the cores of their practices, especially in how they both evolve with technological advancements, their creative natures, and their direct cultural impacts on society. Moreover, there have also been instances that the two professions cross-over and coordinate, pushing the creative boundaries of both filmmakers and architects. Architecture plays an important role in films, just as how films have inspired generations of architects. With the recent emergence of Virtual Reality technology, would this be an opportunity for architecture and filmmaking to collaborate in an ultimate immersive experience? This literature review would discuss and analyse professional perspectives about the relationship between architecture and filmmaking, as well as speculating the opportunities of how the two professions would respond to and evolve with the development of Virtual Reality.
THE SIMILARITIES Storytelling (time) and architecture (space) are believed by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to be fundamental forms of what referred to be “world-making” (1978), which essentially underlined the similarity in nature that both fields share. Both industries are based on coherent structures, generating imaginations, lives, and events. “Plans of buildings are like plots of stories”, the equivalence was claimed by Emmons in his book ‘Confabulation: Storytelling in Architecture’ (2017). Furthermore, they both have undeniably profound impacts on cultural perception, argued by Froehlich (2018). While architecture has progressively transformed itself in the last centuries, changing the way we see our cities. Revolutionary films such as ‘Fight Club’ (1999) and ‘V for Vendetta’ (2005) opened up conversations and ideas that define our today’s pop culture (Englehardt 2017). While sharing the similarly “creative” energy as artists, the roles of architects and filmmakers have a lot in common. Kosinsky, one of the few “risk-takers” that experienced the two professions, reveals his personal reflection of both requiring development of an idea, and communication to the ones who contribute to achieving it (Petrunia 2014). In a Ted Talk in 2009, Bjarke Ingels, one of the most influential architects in the 21st Century, tells the stories of his designs as “natural evolutions”, demonstrating the narrative capabilities of the architectural design process. Furthermore, technology plays a crucial role in the rapid evolution of both professions in recent years, along with its rise to dominance in the Industry 4.0 (Froehlich 2018). Modernly developed tools, such as online channels and generative design software, have facilitated the evolutions of filmmaking and architecture respectively today.