Urja Shrestha

Date: 09/08/22

Topic 1

CINEMATIC ARCHITECTURE: ANALYSIS ON THE RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN SPACE, FORM AND NARRATIVE IN SCIENCE FICTION
FILMS

Science Fiction film is a film genre that revolves around speculative fiction which usually
deals with futuristic and imaginary concepts and phenomena that are not yet accepted by the
mainstream science such as extra-terrestrial beings, interstellar travels, time travels, robots,
etc.

One of the very first sci-fi based stories that was brought to the silver screen was the story of
‘Metropolis’ which is regarded as the pioneer in this genre and how it elevated the use of Art-
Deco Style which became an inspiration to a lot of filmmakers today. With the rise and usage
of CGI, it’s now possible to make a building or even an entire virtual world in a high-level of
realism, which has further made architects and designers curious to investigate.

Since architecture in science-fiction feature films is a vast topic, I wanted my dissertation to

focus more on the utilization of space, form and narrative and its relationship to one another.
In science-fiction films, architectural space is considered to be a space where the audience are
invited to and can partake in it. The forms and spaces, they make their way to the main
audience, which helps the audience to relate and identify the space and form created by the
architecture when viewing the film. This process is integral to a proper understanding of the
film. Architectural narrative is another important part when it comes to science fiction cinema
as it is crucial to building spaces that convey a meaningful message.

Few films that will be used for the case studies and analyses:

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) (inspired from ‘Metropolis’)

Denise Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997)

Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2011)

Topic 2

PRISON ARCHITECTURE: DESIGNING IN A SECURE AND HUMANE

WAY

Back to the Ancient times, prison have been a form of punishment in human society. Today,
this industry is complex and far from perfect, having its own issues. As being one of the
strongest countries, the Unites States have one of the highest incarceration rates, and in that
country alone, there are about 2 million people imprisoned. What’s astonishing is that, there
hasn’t been any sign of decline, instead, America has been seeing about 500% increase in
prison sentences for the last 40 years.

With this, the main focus, that is the architecture of these prisons, is directly linked to
punishment policies or philosophies, which differ from country-to-country. In some
countries, prisons are used as correctional facilities whereas in other countries it functions
more like a rehabilitation centres.

With this topic for my dissertation, I would like to focus on the contrasting prison design in
the United States and in Scandinavian countries and of how Scandinavian prison design has
been singled-out for their open minded and forward looking designs and humane treatment of
inmates, which is reflected in the architecture of these facilities.

And because of that, open styled prison design in these Scandinavian countries have aided
and contributed in low recidivism rates comparing to the high recidivism rates in the United
States.
Topic 3

WORLD BUILDING THROUGH ARCHITECTURE: HOW

ARCHITECTURE AIDS IN WORLD BUILDING PROCESSES OF
DIFFERENT VIDEO GAMES

Architecture has much more of a bigger role than just being a backdrop of a virtual city in
video games. It is, in fact, a fundamental component in designing games which helps
transcend gamers into an immersive virtual world that feels as authentic as possible as the
real world does.

What do we understand by the word ‘World Building’? World Building is basically

constructing a new and imaginative world associated to a fictional universe. And in that,
architecture plays an important role.

For the dissertation in this topic, I would like to talk about the world building that is done in
video games with the help of architecture and how the virtual world and the real world differ
from each other and at the same time how the virtual world takes inspiration from the real
world for the world building.

This research will look at the benefits of conveying concepts or the world building through
architecture. It will look into the opportunities it creates to the gamers from providing
immersive experience to enriching lore and providing characterization.

In this topic we will look into architects’ who have worked in the game industry like Olivier
Azemar and also look into video game setups that has some world building and its
architecture like:

Assassin’s creed

Bloodborne

Dark Souls Franchise

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Bioshock

Elder Scroll:Skyrim