Real Imaginado, a arquitectura de Gotham City

Abstract

Gotham City has always been the perpetually dark metropolis, full of alleys, asylums, caves, mansions, and, of course, Batman. If initially it had a vague resemblance with New York, it quickly became autonomous, allowing any person, in any city, to identify with it. Ever since its creation, Gotham has had an identity as complex and unique as any other real American metropolis, becoming one of the most intricate and interesting city in the world of cities - real or fictional. More than any other city within the DC Comics universe, comics or cinema, Gotham has something that makes it more complete and consistent: a map. Existing for more than 70 years, the Caped Crusader City embodies not only the dreams of its fictional architects, but also of a collective urban paranoia. The work is divided in three parts. The first will present the city, describing it through its multiple representations. The second, seeks to analyse the saga's movies as a mean to represent a reality, an architecture practise that confers scale and realism to a fictional city. Last but not least, it's inten- ded to explore scenography as an architecture particular of cinema, through the analysis of comics and movies constants. A fictional city, whose extensive representations allows it to be possible to describe and present a city as real as any other - imagined reality. As a result of this analysis, the intention is to explore an imaginary reality, which lives through comics and cinema, as a possible form of studying and representing architecture.