This article has been subjected to double blind peer review

This article has been published in: Ocula 14, Visible Cities. In Memory of Giovanna Franci

author: Federico Boni (Scienze Politiche-Università di Milano (IT))

Form follows fiction. Architecture between movie make-believe and tourist practice

language: italian

abstract: The article debates a double dimension of architecture: the "real" - how the buildings have been built and how they appear to us - and the "imaginary" - buildings considered as objects of "imaginary tales", cinema or television, where their use is mediated by the viewer’s gaze. Nevertheless, a viewer can become an user of the "real" architectural spaces reaching them in a kind of "pilgrimage." The core of the article is "film tourism" architecture, considered as a "double vision" (the media viewer and the on-site tourist) of the architectural object. This in turn addresses another "double gaze": that of sociology and that of semiotics. In particular, the analysis will focus on two Italian architectural objects, the Royal Palace and the Villa del Balbianello (Lake Como). These are two locations of the first two films of the new Star Wars trilogy, a postmodern fable allowing cinema tourists to articulate its sense intervening in one of its main morphological aspects, the architectural one

citation information: Federico Boni, Form follows fiction. L’architettura tra finzione cinematografica e pratica turistica, "Ocula", vol.14, n.14, December 2013. DOI: 10.12977/ocula21

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