ABOUT US

François Penz

François Penz

Head of Department of Architecture
fp12@cam.ac.uk

• Professor in Architecture and the Moving Image
• Director of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies
• Director of the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualisation and Communication
• Fellow of Darwin College
• Director of Studies for Darwin College and Hughes Hall

HONOURS & AWARDS
• Awarded a Honorary Concurrent Professorship at Nanjing University in April 2012
• Awarded in May 2009 the order of ‘Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques’ by the French Ambassador in London in recognition to the dissemination of French film culture in the UK.

Maureen Thomas

Maureen Thomas

Senior Research Associate
mt242@cam.ac.uk

Maureen Thomas research interests include the theory and practice of spatially organised narrativity (including interactivity) and modes of representation and engagement, co-founded DIGIS with François Penz in 1998 and co-directed the MPhil in Architecture and the Moving Image, also supervising PhD students and later helping to develop and teach the MML MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures.

For DIGIS, Maureen has participated in Marvellous Transformations (project leader), Urban Cinematic Geographies of Battersea, Museum as Interface, Cinemarchitecture, MIST (project leader), ATCAD (project leader), Discursive Formations, New Millennium – New Media (NM2) (Co-I) and Smart Media (project leader).

SELECTED RESEARCH GRANTS

2018-2019

AHRC

CineMuseSpace

A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences

2015

National Gallery

Cambridge Humanities Research Grants

[with Dr Donal Cooper] Virtual San Pier Maggiore: The digital repatriation of Florence’s Renaissance past and the future of 3D visualisation for cultural heritage

2012-2013

AHRC

Cultural Engagement grant

The Museum as Interface – with Kettles’ Yard Dec ’12 to May’13

2013

AHRC

Cinematic Geographies of Battersea

Urban Interface & Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge in collaboration with English Heritage (PI: Prof François Penz Value: £200’000)

2010

EU ERASMUS

CinemArchitecture

CinemArchitecture was an intensive summer 2-week residential symposium/seminar/workshop supported by the EU ERASMUS programme.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2017

François Penz

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture. Routledge.

2017

François Penz, R. Koeck (eds.)

Cinematic Urban Geographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2017

François Penz

‘Absorbing cinematic modernism: from the Villa Savoye to the Villa Arpel’, in Graham Cairns (ed.) Visioning technologies: the architectures of sight. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. pp. 121–135.

2017

Maureen Thomas, Chris Speed, Chris Barber

‘Ghost Cinema App: Temporal Ubiquity and the Condition of Being in Everything’ pp 313-336 in Penz & Koeck (eds.), Cinematic Urban Geographies, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

2017

Maureen Thomas, François Penz, Aileen Reid,

Cinematic Urban Archaeology: the Battersea Case’ pp. 191-221 in Penz, François and Koeck, Richard (eds.), Cinematic Urban Geographies, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

RECENT RESEARCH

Landscape Storytelling:

seminar, book launch & film screenings

London, 33 Finsbury Square
Monday Jan 13th 2020
15.30 - 22.15

Landscapes are rich emergent envelopes of material and immaterial qualities that require capturing for further thickening. Filmic and photographic approaches embed strong sensorial experience and narration for portraying these entanglements, influencing not only the way landscapes are shaped but also how humans and living organisms are shaped by their engagement with both landscapes and film as mediums of experience and emergence.

Landscape Storytelling aims to explore, test and discuss such exchanges between site, [audio] visual research methods, humans and living organisms. We ask: how can visual and audio-visual records of global landscapes that embody storytelling bring together productive exchanges and artistry between the qualitative readings of our forests, gardens, rivers, oceans, towns, cities, factories and businesses with quantitative environmental research data?

The event welcomes landscape architects, architects, filmmakers, photographers, archaeologists, biological fiction writers, environmental scientists, climate change activists and all interested in our ecological present, past and futures.

The event includes the book launch of Architecture Filmaking (edited by Igea Troiani and Hugh Campell) which investigates the ways in which architectural researchers, teachers of architecture, their students and practicing architects, filmmakers and artists are using filmmaking uniquely in their practice. Copies can be bought for a special price at the event.




CineMuseSpace:

A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences 2018

Building on André Malraux's idea of the Musée Imaginaire [Museum without Walls], a secondary phase of the project will create dedicated museum installations to disseminate the research findings. Three museum installation will be set up in collaboration with the National Museums Liverpool, the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester and the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts in China.


Inaugural workshop of the CineMuseSpace project 2017

Digital Studio Symposium 2017

The Digital Studio Symposium at the Martin Centre 50th Anniversary Conference As part of the Martin Centre 50th Anniversary Conference in December 2017, former and current members of the Digital Studio research group from around the world gathered to present their latest research and the trajectories they have taken in their careers. Led by the Digital Studio founders François Penz and Maureen Thomas, the event highlighted the diversity of topics explored by the research group over the years.



Cinematic Urban Geographies Conference 2013

AHRC funded reseach aimed to explore the different facets by which cinema and the moving image contribute to our understanding of cities and their topographies. This event will be the final act of an AHRC research project entitled Cinematic Geographies of Battersea.


The conference is supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH)

The Museum as Interface Symposium 2013

The Museum as Interface is an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund research project conducted by the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art of Cambridge University and Kettle’s Yard. Following in the footsteps of previous investigations into digital technologies in museum contexts at the university.



Cinematic Geographies of Battersea 2012-13

Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface and Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge is an AHRC-funded research project being conducted by the Universities of Cambridge and Liverpool in partnership with English Heritage (EH). This projects aims to complement work on the parish of Battersea, by studying how this area has been portrayed in films over the 20th century.


The conference is supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH)

Cinematic Mapping of Cambridge

Cinematic Mapping of Cambridge contains the video archive of the Digital Studio (DIGIS) for Research in Design, Visualisation and Communication, Martin Centre, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. It contains both research and practice-based movies about the city and the University of Cambridge.


Cinematic Mapping of Cambridge was funded by the Isaac Newton Trust 2011-12


Cambridge Cinematic Mapping


click below for the interactive map
Click here for the interactive map

PHD

Dr Stavros Alifragkis

Dr Stavros Alifragkis

'City Symphonies' reconstructing the Urban Landscape: Dziga Vertov's 'Man with the Movie Camera'

Bio
Dr Giorgos Artopoulos

Dr Georgios Artopoulos


Asstistant Professor at The Cyprus Institute

Bio
Dr Mark Breeze

Dr Mark Breeze


Director of Studies St. John's College, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Bio
Dr Simone Chung

Dr Simone Chung

Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture National University of Singapore

Bio
Dr Pei-Hsien Hsu

Dr Pei-Hsien Hsu

Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Architecture, National Chiao Tung University

Bio
Dr Richard Koeck

Dr Richard Koeck

Professor, School of Architecture University of Liverpool

Bio
Dr Andong Lu

Dr Andong Lu

Professor in Urbanism & Architectural Theory, School of Architecture, Nanjing University

Bio
Dr Michael Nitsche

Dr Michael Nitsche

Associate Professor, School of Literature, Communication & Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology

Bio
Dr Phillip Prager

Dr Phillip Prager


Lecturer, IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark. Postdoctoral Fellow in neuroaesthetics

Bio
Dr Martyn Dade Robertson

Dr Martyn Dade Robertson

Lecturer in Architecture, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University

Bio
Dr Stanislav Roudavski

Dr Stanislav Roudavski

Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Melbourne

Bio
Dr Eric Schuldenfrei

Dr Eric Schuldenfrei


Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong

Bio
Dr Janina Schupp

Dr Janina Schupp

Construction of cinematic spaces in reality, specifically simulations of urban space based on cinematic models

Bio
Dr Julia Sussner

Dr Julia Sussner


Parsing Place: Staging Spatially Organised Narrative in Interactive Digital Environments

Bio
Dr Micah Trippe

Dr Micah Trippe


The Case of the French City Film in the 1920s

Bio
Dr Duan Wu

Dr Duan Wu


Embodied Tectonics of Space and its Architectural Aesthetics

Bio
Gavin Hogben

Gavin Hogben


Architect and teaching at Brown University

Bio
Stefanos Roimpas

Stefanos Roimpas


architect, his research is on Architecture & the 4th dimension

Bio
Amir Soltani

Amir Soltani


Digital Design and Architecture

Bio

Cambridge 1575 map Comparison


click for the interactive map

PUBLICATIONS

Cinematic Aided Design @ Amazon

Cinematic Aided Design

An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture. Routledge

Cinematic Urban Geographies @ Amazon

Cinematic Urban Geographies (Screening Spaces)

Cinematic Urban Geographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Absorbing cinematic modernism @ Routledge

Absorbing cinematic modernism

From the Villa Savoye to the Villa Arpel, Chapter 7 from Visioning Technologies The Architectures of Sight, Routledge

Urban Cinematics @ Amazon

Urban Cinematics

Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image

Cambridge in concrete @ Amazon

Cambridge in concrete

Cambridge in concrete. Images from the RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection, Paparo

Space @ Amazon

Space

In Science, Art and Society (Darwin College Lectures)

Architectures of Illusion @ Amazon

Architectures of Illusion

From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments, University of Chicago Press

Cinema and Architecture @ Amazon

Cinema and Architecture

Cinema and Architecture: Melies, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, BFI Publishing

Computers in Architecture @ Amazon

Computers in Architecture

Tools for Design, Longman

AFFILIATES

Brian Ashbee

Brian Ashbee

(Video artist) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Dr Andong Lu

Dr Andong Lu

Professor in Urbanism & Architectural Theory, School of Architecture, Nanjing University

Stephen Guy Daltry

Stephen Guy Daltry

Lecturer, Dept of Architecture, Neapolis University Pafos, Cyprus

Helen McGregor

Helen McGregor

(Voice artist Actor) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Kariina Gretere

Kariina Gretere

(Composer Performer) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Sam Moon

Sam Moon

Cinematographer DIGIS Visiting Artist Researche

Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs

(Scenographer Painter Sculptor) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Dr Michael Nitsche

Dr Michael Nitsche

Associate Professor, School of Literature, Communication & Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr Marco Iuliano

Dr Marco Iuliano

Senior Lecturer School of Architecture University of Liverpool

Dr Phillip Prager

Dr Phillip Prager

Lecturer, IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark. Postdoctoral Fellow in neuroaesthetics

Dr Richard Koeck

Dr Richard Koeck

Professor, School of Architecture University of Liverpool

Mika Tuomola

Mika Tuomola

(Interactive media director) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Ludvig Lohse

Ludvig Lohse

(Filmmaker Interactive editor Designer) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Terence Wright

Terence Wright

(Visual anthropologist) DIGIS Visiting Artist Researcher

Duncan McCauley

Duncan McCauley

Architecture and Design

CineTecture

CineTecture

Moving Image Productions

Parsing Place Productions

Parsing Place Productions

design studio specializing in interactive content

CONTACT

Department of Architecture
University of Cambridge
1-5 Scroope Terrace
Cambridge CB2 1PX
UK

webmaster@arct.cam.ac.uk

+44 01223 332950