Architecture & Film Symposium: Of Affect
Symposium Chairs:
Jon Yoder, PhD, Kent State University
Vahid Vahdat, PhD, Washington State University
Join us for the Architecture & Film Symposium, a biennial event where this year’s theme, “Of Affect,” explores how architecture and cinema shape and reimagine worlds through emotion, atmosphere, and sensory experience. Visit www.architectureandfilm.org to learn more!
Architecture and film are famous for their affinities. For starters, both fields are incredibly complex. Buildings and films can both take years to complete, and their production teams sometimes consist of hundreds of people. Both fields also often focus on worldmaking. Indeed, the best buildings and films both routinely construct challenging new visual and spatial experiences and environments. Despite countless cross-disciplinary exchanges, however, scholarship on architecture and film has tended to operate in only two main areas: depictions of buildings and cities in films, and influences of filmic logics and techniques on the design of buildings.
Instead, this symposium solicits emerging research that explores notions of affect in architecture and film. Like other cultural spheres including fashion, food, and music, architecture and film are increasingly expected to elicit emotional and sensorial, affective responses. Ambient and atmospheric approaches abound. And the boundaries among aesthetics, politics, cultures, and technologies have never been blurrier in both fields.
CLICK HERE FOR A COMPLETE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
October 23
Papers, Short Films, Keynote Lectures, Roundtables
1:30 PM – Symposium Introductions
2:30 PM – Paper Session: “AffecGve Territories”
4:45 PM – Short Film Screenings: “Exposing Affect”
5:15 PM – Filmmaker Roundtable Discussion
6:15 PM – Keynote Discussion: Kristen Kreider, James O’Leary, Vahid Vahdat, Jon Yoder
Cene Lecture Hall, Kent State University
October 24
Morning Session
8:30 AM – Paper Session: “Affective Landscapes”
10:15 AM – Paper Session: “Affective (Re)collections”
Cene Lecture Hall, Kent State University
Afternoon Session
1:15 PM – Paper Session: “Affect or Revolution?”
3:30 PM – Short Film Screenings: “Projecting Affect”
4:00 PM – Filmmaker Roundtable Discussion
5:15 PM – Keynote Lecture: Kristen Kreider + James O’Leary, “Ungovernable Spaces”
6:15 – Roundtable Discussion: Kristen Kreider, James O’Leary, Vahid Vahdat, Jon Yoder, Liam Young
October 25
Morning Session
8:30 AM – Paper Session: “Intermedial Pedagogies”
10:15 AM – Paper Session: “Intermedial Projections
Cene Lecture Hall, Kent State University
Afternoon Session
4:00 PM – Keynote Lecture: Liam Young, “Planetary Imaginaries”
5:00 PM – Film Screenings: The Great Endeavour, After the End, Planet City
6:00 PM – Roundtable Discussion: Kristen Kreider, James O’Leary, Bilgesu Sisman, Vahid Vahdat, Jon Yoder, Liam Young
Peter B. Lewis Theater, Cleveland Cinematheque
Keynote Speakers
Kreider + O’Leary
Kreider + O’Leary are a poet and an architect who collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. Since 2003, they have made work in places such as prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments and more traditional gallery venues across the UK, USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. Their work has been shown at venues including Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts as well as in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Istanbul Biennial. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press (2015), Field Poetics was published Ma Bibliothèque (2018) and their monograph Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance has recently been published by Bloomsbury (2025).
Kristen Kreider (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
James O’Leary (BA, M.Arch, PhD) is Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where he teaches on the MA Situated Practice.
Liam Young
Liam Young is an Australian born architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. Building his design fictions from the realities of the present, Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures.
Young has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine, and Dazed and Confused and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs the MA in Fiction and Entertainment program at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.