Occassionally while I was at UT Austin Architecture professors would mention a student from previous years, Catherine Hardwicke, who was also pursuing a career outside of architecture with her degree. She’s now an award-winning film director (http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200612/20061214_hardwicke.html). It would be interesting to discuss with her the impact that architectural education has had on her career and whether she sees them as related.
In the interview with Tavis Smiley linked above she notes:
Tavis: There is an obvious answer to this, but I wanna get below the obvious. ‘Cause a simpleton like me can see the obvious parallels between architecture and being a director. Are there deeper parallels?
Hardwicke: Well, for architecture, it’s like structural visualization. You have to stand there and imagine what could that house look like? What could that space feel like? How will the light come in in the morning? Same kind of thing. Like, we’ll go out, like, say on the movie ‘Tombstone,’ we go out to just an open field out in the middle of the desert and think, I could build a town here that’ll look like Tombstone, and we could have the horses riding in.
So you’re previsualizing stuff, and trying to, like, make it come alive. And then you have to figure out how to carry it through, either draw the blueprints, write the screenplay, do the storyboards. All those ways to make it real.
