The present paper examines, in a case study format, the use of films, short films and audiovisual documentaries as reasoning and references for design assignments during the first years of an architectural degree course. The aim of this fruitful and comparable experience is not so much to study and verify the well-known synergies between film and architecture, but to emphasize the methodological importance of endowing students in their first experience of design projects with realistic and feasible support – through visual references – that can increase their awareness of the desire for realism to which every project aspires. Project simulacrum finds an ally in the realistic fiction present in film. | Journal of Technology and Science Education JOTSE, 2018 – 8(3): 169-178 – Online ISSN: 2013-6374 – Print ISSN: 2014-5349 DESIGNING FROM CINEMA: FILM AS TRIGGER OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS IN ARCHITECTURE Iñaki Bergera Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) ibergera@ Received January 2018 Accepted February 2018 Abstract The present paper examines, in a case study format, the use of films, short films and audiovisual documentaries as reasoning and references for design assignments during the first years of an architectural degree course. The aim of this fruitful and comparable experience is not so much to study and verify the well-known synergies between film and architecture, but to emphasize the methodological importance of endowing students in their first experience of design projects with realistic and feasible support – through visual references – that can increase their awareness of the desire for realism to which every project aspires. Project simulacrum finds an ally in the realistic fiction present in film. The association between film and architecture is thus placed at the service of learning and design methodology, as a means, not as an end. Keywords – Project, Methodology, Narrative, Film, Visuality, User. ---------1. Introduction My long teaching experience as the head of architectural design courses for architecture degree students in their first years has, unintentionally, allowed me to give continuity to an approach and format for exercises whose virtues and effectiveness can now be enhanced and examined in perspective. To date, and over the last decade, a total of eight films and short films and documentaries have served to structure the tasks and aims of assignments we set for students. The fact that topics such as place, design briefs and, significantly, the final user of the project encounter a form of real materialization in the story told by a film allows us to verify, by means of the tangible results of .
