Lights, Camera, Architecture
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner reveals complex ideas about architecture as a tool of engagement that parallels the ideas brought forth from Venturi and Scott-Brown’s Vegas studio exploration. Similarly to how Las Vegas’s architecture pushes its agenda of entertainment and profit through lights, large screens, etc., the lighting and set design of Blade Runner brings to life an architecture that realistically embodies the futuristic narrative that holds up even today, years after 2019.
On a related note, Blade Runner shows a fictional depiction of the failure of utopian planning that became characteristic of modernist architects. While in this case the utopian agenda was originally initiated by people rather than the architecture itself, the conditions that resulted reflect a similar collapse of social structure as seen in architectural projects, like Pruitt Igoe, that created a dystopian environment rather than utopian.
I could relate the movie to this week's discussion on "The Architectures of Capitalism and Congestion". There was an interesting collage of futuristic technologies, buildings, advertising platforms, etc., and the messiness of feelings and basic human nature.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points, Kelsey. Somewhere along the line it seems like the idea of utopian, often congested, architecture became disconnected from the social nature of people. And since architecture is supposed to be for people, congested architecture for the sake of being congested is an irrelevant practice.
ReplyDeleteI think this a great observation and to even further prove your point, in Denis Villeneuve's sequel Blade Runner 2049, we visit Las Vegas itself, and the place has been so over-commercialized that it has become a complete wasteland, an empty shell of the former holy grail of capitalism. The idea that the architecture or "utopia's" we design today will remain exactly how we intend them to forever is a naïve notion.
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