THE REAR WINDOW.

Design Summer Studio 2025. Virginia Tech School of Architecture.
Jessica Hernandez / Edgar Garcia.

Architecture Seen Through a Window.

The fascinating film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock will be analyzed and will serve as an exercise to demonstrate how architecture can be understood and explored as a narrative medium, where observation, perception, and spatial composition converge to create meaning. By analyzing the film, students engage with the idea that the built environment, like cinema, can guide attention, evoke emotions, and structure experiences through framing, fragmentation, and layering of space.

Objective:

• To explore the relationship between cinema and architecture through the spatial and narrative analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window.

• To understand the use of a film as a narrative and spatial model to reflect on the relationship between scale, body, space,  observation and architecture.

Inspired by Hitchcock’s construction of tension and meaning through framing, gaze, and spatial fragmentation, this exercise invites students to explore how architecture like cinema can become a device for storytelling, sensory experience, and the direction of attention.  The use of formal transformation techniques will be guided by design principles, digital thinking and narrative foundations, encouraging a critical, theoretical, and project-based approach from the first semester.

Students:

Lillian Boggan
Morgan Chapman
Emily Cooper
Julia Manion
Alexsa McKeown
Everett Mitchell
Katie Poston
Shannon Reese
Emily Thornton
Ethan Vandecasteele
Maeve Willmann