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Contemporary Architectural Discourse Colloquium


 
Peggy Deamer
 

Organized by second-year M.E.D. students in collaboration with the director of M.E.D. Studies, this colloquium brings in guest speakers from all disciplines to discuss their work around a selected topic. The colloquium for spring 2007, “Critical Imaginaries,” explores the social and political dimension that speculative and fictive genres—such as visionary architecture, graphic novels, films and animé, locative media, and digital game space—can introduce to contemporary architecture and urbanism.

 


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Boom. Anime.
A paper surveying a wide variety of contemporary japanese animated film and tv series (anime) and investigating their role in architecture and architecture's role in them, as well as uncovering the enriching and theoretical qualities of this asian art form.

Introduction from the paper:

Carefully hidden from western eyes by virtue of the preconception that cartoons are for children, lies a vast universe of immensely rich and profound fantasies about life, death, all that’s in between and beyond, time, existence, religion, art and architecture. From the earliest inceptions of Japanese animated narrative cinema a profound difference can be detected from its Western inspirations such as Disney and Warner Brothers. Increasingly tailoring for a mature audience, Anime rose in popularity while Japan’s respected live-action cinema industry witnessed a steep decline in the post war era. Covering a wide array of genres and audiences, from sitcom, romantic comedy and children’s fairy tales to horror, abstract artistic and a large amount of pornographic genres, Anime defies comparison with the western animated industry. Once accepted as a profound and potentially philosophical medium a study of Anime can yield a wealth of personalised interpretations on the more profound notions inherent in life, that which can only be imagined.... and drawn.

In the blackened and burnt out world of Akira or to the refined psychological manipulative city and infrastructure framework of Lain: Serial Experiments, a world of fantasy exists that defies binaries like good and bad, justice and crime, life and death and dystopia or utopia. Always centered on the human experience, Anime can give a profound meaning to imagined architecture as the backdrop, enabler or even generator of human life and experience.