Taking Place was inaugurated in 2014 as a Bachelor of Architecture teaching program at the Institute of Architecture and Culture, Royal Danish Academy. The program's title reflects its ambition to anchor architecture education in a deeper understanding of place.
The title carries a double meaning. First, it refers to the activities occurring within architecture, acknowledging the fundamental field of tension between physical manifestations of architecture and their lived realities. Second, qua its Danish origin — where "taking place" is called "finding place" — it highlights the act of identifying a suitable place for architecture. The course is rooted in an understanding of architecture wherein architecture never "lands" as an object on a site but is rather teased out of it.
Cinematic Cartography is the filmic mapping practice developed within Taking Place. It proposes that architecture students can engage with the multifaceted complexities of the contemporary European city not through conventional cartographic tools, but through the lens of a film camera placed at eye-level.
Rather than surveying from above, students embed themselves within urban contexts — experiencing and mapping the nuances of daily life through film as a tool for observation and analysis. This approach allows us to interrogate the urban commonplace: those shared spaces and practices essential to dwelling in the city, where space is constantly produced through social interaction and lived experience.
"We entirely skip the often-implied, top-down mapping analysis and instead introduce the lens of a camera to capture the city via an eye-level perspective."
Film and architecture may seem like opposite practices — one temporal, the other static. But buildings experienced in real life carry a presence beyond their photographs, defined by the people that inhabit them. Conversely, films can define a city's character so powerfully that we may know a place strictly from how it is portrayed on screen.
Film offers a means of engaging with the sensorial, temporal, and narrative dimensions of space that traditional architectural representation cannot capture. As Juhani Pallasmaa argues, film mirrors the way we inhabit the world — not only through sight, but through a synthesis of sound, movement, and touch, offering an embodied experience of space.
Associate Professor, Royal Danish Academy. Program leader of Taking Place (Finder Sted). Co-author of Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization.
Architect and researcher. Teaches film and architecture at the Royal Danish Academy. Co-author of Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization. Background in film production and art in public space projects across Copenhagen, Berlin, New York, Basel, and Mendrisio.