What.is.this?

S c a l i n g T i m e is a workshop hosted by the University of Minnesota's School of Architecture which focuses on diagramming interaction with space through time lapse and long-exposure.

The first photographs allowed the capture of a moment for endless study. Present-day high-speed cameras can capture 100 billion frames, or 130 years worth of standard-speed video, in one second.

Slowing time in this manner has precipitated advances in myriad fields of study. The architect’s study, however, is largely the inverse: to understand the course of a day, season, or lifetime in a moment.

The workshop is an introduction to time-lapse photography & videography as valid diagrammatic method. It begins with video examples demonstrating how timelapse has been and can be a tool for architects, and continues with an overview of pertinent capture, motion, and editing technologies. Students use their smart phones, GoPro’s, or dslr cameras to investigate the value of compressing time as it pertains to urban planning, transportation, space planning, ergonomics, daylighting, and others. These studies are paired with traditional graphic and rhetorical diagram exercises to complement and layer with the captures.

Learning to see through the lense of altered time states, students gain an understanding of the flow of unseen processes around them. The intent of the studio is for each student to not only gain a new marketable diagrammatic skillset, but that their own perception of time, space, and how we all move through them, might be expanded.

Info

UMN School ofArchitecture
Rapson Hall- Room 145
89 Church Street
Minneapolis, MN 55455 

All images and video copyright University of Minnesota and cited student.