HANNEY DESIGNS
Governance 2074
Brief
This unit investigated how architecture can be represented and experienced through the language of film, game design, and real-time visualisation. Students were challenged to speculate on the future of architecture, technology, and governance through a series of immersive design exercises.
The semester began with the creation of a Sensory Manifesto — an introspective catalogue of cinematic and game environments that evoke awe through spatial qualities such as light, geometry, sound, and atmosphere. These insights formed the conceptual foundation for a speculative design competition titled Governance 2074: The Future of Power and Architecture, asking how space and landscape might shape political experience fifty years from now.
Across the three stages, students developed advanced skills in digital modelling, rendering, and storytelling — translating architectural ideas into photo-real and interactive environments using tools like Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, and Adobe Suite. The final submission culminated in either a cinematic short film or a real-time interactive model, presented to a judging panel as a fully immersive architectural experience.
Submission: June 2024
Overview
My study into immersive architecture examines how emotion, perception, and atmosphere can define spatial experience. The work evolved through layers of cinematic research, material testing, and compositional refinement — culminating in an interactive portfolio and film that reveal how light, rhythm, and sound transform built space into narrative. Every frame and diagram was developed to explore the architecture’s capacity to move, to breathe, and to engage the viewer beyond visual representation. What emerged is an experiential sequence — one that unfolds through light and shadow, stillness and motion, inviting a heightened awareness of presence within space.
Concept
At the heart of the design is an exploration of how sensory contrast creates meaning. Spaces expand and contract, textures shift between smooth and raw, and light dissolves the threshold between enclosure and openness. Geometry, rhythm, and material are choreographed like cinematography — shaping how movement is felt, not just seen. Each transition was composed to guide perception and emotion, creating a dialogue between body and environment. The architecture exists as an unfolding narrative, where atmosphere becomes structure and sensation becomes form — a balance of precision and poetics that defines the work.