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Research
Subject
The Building of Imaginary Worlds in Environments of the Virtual: Architect as World-Builder
First and second supervisors
Abstract
As physical, analogue design and building practices progress into alternative mediums of the virtual, the architect's role in more contemporary worlds of space-making becomes widely contested. From drawing to film to the digital and immersive, new-media landscapes are reshaping how architecture and our built environment are conceived, constructed, and experienced. The virtual has been an important theme of architectural practice and discourse since the Italian Renaissance established the architect's position as a visual artist, associating a drawn line to the construction of an idea.
However, in Japan, the Western concept of the architect as a designer, and architecture as an art and a profession, only coincided with the arrival of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research, therefore, emphasises that Japanese visual cultures have been informed by cross-cultural dialogues, and that animation and architecture are embedded within historical and contemporary, Western and Japanese understandings of the virtual.
My interdisciplinary explorations as an architect world-building for Japanese animation auteur, Director Mamoru Hosoda, question the Western-centric focus of architectural discourse and practice and reassesses the contemporary meanings and practices of the virtual. To contribute new understandings to the practice of world-building, this research contextualises current architectural and world-building applications, acknowledges the cultural, social, and political agencies of different world-building pathways, and critically situates a rigorous analysis of the knowledge, techniques, and values that underpin an alternative design practice. Embedded in methods of drawing, writing, interviews, and archival research, an autoethnographic inquiry of practice-based reflections, real-time explorations, and design-based investigations establishes critical tools for the contemporary architect to assume the role of a virtual world-builder.
At the forefront of this research, the world-building architect is actively recognised as a valuable discipline in shaping expansive, inclusive, and inspiring contributions to architectural imaginaries, and built environments of the virtual.
Biography
Eric studied Art and Architecture at the Byam Shaw School of Art, Central Saint Martins, he completed his undergraduate degree at Cardiff University and graduated with a masters from the UCL: Bartlett School of Architecture. He later completed his Part III professional studies at the University of Cambridge where he qualified as an Architect. Eric was nominated for the RIBA President’s Silver Medal and is a recipient of the Bartlett School of Architecture Medal, the Sir Banister Fletcher Medal, and the Fitzroy Robinson Drawing Prize. His works has been widely published and exhibited, from the RIBA Journal, Architects Journal, Blueprint Magazine, VICE, through to the Design Museum, World Architecture Festival and the Sir John Soane Museum. Eric is a qualified architect and a senior lecturer who has taught at UCL: Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Greenwich at undergraduate and postgraduate level respectively. He has also worked with Oscar-nominated Director Mamoru Hosoda as the production designer for the animated feature film Belle.
Funding
- University College London Research Excellence Scholarship (UCL-RES)
Links
Image: The Portal World-Builder: In memory of Professor Jonathan Hill, 1958-2022, “to all the doors and opportunities Jonathan has opened to us all in his orbit”, 2022 (drawing by author)