Description
Why do we think of Paris as the city of love? Or of Tokyo as the city of the future?
Our perception of cities is shaped by how we seen them in fiction, films, and literature. Our built environment is
a pot-pourri of shared fictional references; of film scenes and novel chapters. A city?s fictional portrayal plays
as much of a role in determining our emotions towards that city as the physical buildings of which it consists.
In this studio you will create a short film. For your film, you will design a city and a character :
Your city takes an existing urban condition, characteristic of a real city, and exaggerates it.
In New York City this could be a city of fantastical Lower East Side tenement buildings, grown into and over one
other to support new generations of immigrant families, peppered with a patchwork of Chinatown neon, Jewish
deli signs and Little Italy banners. In Hong Kong this could be an overgrown Kowloon Walled City, towering fifty
stories high, hyperdense, and c