Stranger Than Fiction

In a world dominated and organized by the ability to read, decode, and scroll through thousands of images every day, the IDEAS Entertainment Studio is uniquely positioned to provide a platform for architects to engage in the design and shaping of environments as well as their audiences. Architects work in a profession that traditionally privileges form over image, yet live in a world that does the reverse. This studio situates itself at the crosshairs of that reality at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design's IDEAS Campus, fully equipped for students to explore what it means to work and learn as an architect today in a world filled with (and often, consumed by) the tools, techniques and instincts of animators, filmmakers, storytellers and other communicators, as well as their audiences. We will build worlds and stories that align space and form with image and technology, in order to transform the role of the architect in a massively mediated world – and discipline – like the one we all inhabit today. Along the way we will: transgress the authentic with the fantastical; the real with the fictional; the willful and the arbitrary, in order to not only invent, but render, animate and broadcast architectural, visual worlds of tomorrow.

A fundamental goal of the IDEAS Entertainment Studio is to build new, unexpected kinds of architectural worlds. The studio has a goal as well to build the audiences that will inhabit these worlds. In the hyper-mediated environment of the 21st century, architects need to look beyond their normal audience (of other architects) to embrace as well a larger world now largely living within the stories and images of our time. To be an architect today is to be an individual able to imagine as well as arrange connections – whether in the literal joints and materials of a physical object’s making, no less than the subtler and experiential moments of the people, spaces and events architecture has, more meaningfully, always been made from. That act of imagination, visualization, and communication lies at the center of this studio’s teaching, learning and research. Our interest isn’t just the making of objects, or their images, but instead the new kinds of imagination – and their related media environments – in which the figure of the architect today lives. It’s a world you now already know better than architecture itself.