Defining My Topic

February 24, 2026

This past class, we met in smaller groups with the professors to check on our topic development, as we are getting closer and closer to our presentations to the honors committee. Due to my topic choice being chosen a bit later than planned, I didn't fully have an indefinite concept of what I would be studying. Yes, I have looked at several articles, but my idea would often stray away from most of them, which covered different themes of scenography and architecture.

So, in our discussion, I posed the question that I had come up with this past week, with very little evidence to back it up, seeing as it was so recently posed.

If fictional worlds within films and video games are based in architectural realism, how do

architects create a fantastical atmosphere that escapes reality? What attributes can be taken

from this analysis to creatively design architectural buildings that evoke inspiration within

mundane modernity?

One of the first questions that I got, which I hadn't thought to define, was, "What style of architecture would I be focusing on?" In my mind, I was generalizing fantasy architecture into one singular, surreal style, not relating it to a particular architectural one. To this question, I responded with a simple answer, "castles," which I think I instantly regretted. I think I needed my group to better understand that I wasn't trying to define fantasy architecture to a single style, but I was hoping to study precedents that blended styles to make something more whimsical and surreal. For this, I realized I need to narrow my question down more and break down the parts of my case study that I was trying to achieve (motivation, audience, impact, method, and theory).

Later in the week, I was reading the capstone for the case study presentation, which was "Alfred Hitchcock as a Cinematic Architect of Suspense," by Hannah Both. Due to the fact that it was in the realm of both cinema and architecture, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to study how Both formatted her project, especially in terms of methodology. From this, I gained some great insight on the potential of my topic, which I'm hoping to eventually create a visual representation of. The collages, renderings, and models she did were very similar to what I was already thinking for my project, which helped justify my own ideas and concern for creative limitation. By next week, I'm hoping to create a formal list of case study components.