Architectures in Motion BERLIN SEPTEMBER 9-27, 2015 Participants from film academia and associated media studies, along with filmmakers, came together for a one-day symposium entitled Architectures in Motion, during the documentary film season of the same name, organized by DOKU.ARTS (1) and held at the Zeughauskino of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The symposium, set against the backdrop of urban planning over the last 150 years, looked at architectural anthropology in tandem with the simultaneous growth of the modern city, mass media, and psychology. Papers presented included What the Architectural Avant-Garde Learned from Film: The Case of Diller Scofido + Renfro, mirrors cinema by being a collective process, Filming Ground Zero: Politics and Reconstruction, and Filming Architecture, or How Can One Reconcile the Extraordinary Pleasure, the Monumental Effect of Architecture, with the Love of Detail, the Subtle Effect of Cinema? With guests including Thomas Elsa-esser (professor emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam), Phyllis Lambert (architect and founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Quebec), and moderator Jorg Taszman (film critic and journalist for the Deutschlandradio Kultur Radio program, Die Welt and epd Film), the symposium moved from nineteenth-century stereographs to early filmed panoramas and city symphonies, to games, interactive documentaries, and urban simulations, in order to locate these most recent urban representations in an age of changing media and ways of thinking about the city. The event focused on shifting architecture and space-time configurations, unconventional approaches, and long-term observations of major architectural projects. In the opening keynote lecture on Media, Metropolis, Mind: Wandering Through 150 Years of Urban Documentation, William Uricchio (professor of comparative media studies and principal investigator of the Open Documentary Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]) argued that the high-rise building has to be reimagined: it's not just what we see, it's how we see. He believes documentary itself mirrors as there are dissonant patterns in how documentary films are organized and constructed that mirror the dissonant patterns in architectural approaches. Over the last 120 years (being that cinema as a social phenomenon began in 1895) the dissonant patterns in both documentary and architectural forms have reflected historical transformations. Uricchio cited the late MIT Professor William Mitchell, who suggested that is practical while our everyday lineage is virtually virtual. Uricchio linked this to the idea that documentary film has progressively bridged the social consequences of to the extent that there is now a historically recognizable type of documentary that is part of and enables a new urban vision. He believes periods of stress, turmoil, and rapid growth in society have historically accompanied the transformation of the documentary film. For example, in the first decade of cinema, eighty percent of films were nonfiction, and a vast number of these films were categorized as panoramic (meaning continuous or containing a full and wide view). The skyscrapers of cities like New York that were being built at the time were important and perfect for the camera's commanding viewpoint. Uricchio argued that two landmark film examples from the 1920s--Berlin: Symphony of a Creat City (1927, directed by Walter Ruttmann) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929, directed by Dziga Vertov)--were not in actuality portraying their respective cities; in fact, Moscow and Odessa were conflated in the latter example, which was therefore a portrait of a large collective city by applying the life as it is lived method. For the speaker, both films were evocations, extrapolating what the urban means. In both, we encounter a montage of effects on the street that are sometimes repeated, creating a multiple effect that is panoramic. …