A Survey of Utopia—Creating Filmic Travelogues in Architectural Design Studio Education

This paper investigates the potential of the creation of filmic travelogues in architectural design studio education. It looks at student works from a studio conducted at RWTH Aachen University in the summer term of 2017 and explores how the works construct meaning from and reflect on architectural reference in an active creative process. The assignment of the studio was to create a travelogue of a 4-day excursion to Belgium and the South of England in the form of a short film. Inspired by Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space, the students were invited to explore the Situationist techniques of Drifting and Psychogeography, and to use them in their visual storytelling. The studio´s title A Survey of Utopia makes reference to the architectural and urbanistic projects that were visited: visionary residential projects from the 1960s to 1980s, built by well-known architects of this period, such as Lucien Kroll, Walter Segal and Leon Krier. The term utopia hints at the projects shared interest in radical change and bold new architectural approaches, even though each pursues its own distinct kind of utopia