The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  This blurring was not only seen in the intentions of the artists and the nature of the piece, but was also evident in the behaviour of the public. Once visitors to the gallery were aware of the artistically orientated surveillance they were subject to, their behaviour immediately became more self-conscious. Echoing the effects underlined in Das Experiment, in a less intimidating context, people looked and looked away, moved out of view or, alternatively, turned their backs. Some openly performed for the camera and, in doing so, displayed a reaction also portrayed by Hirschbiegel whose characters initially play and taunt the guards through the surveillance equipment of their mock-up cells. One could say that, finding themselves under surveillance, both the prisoners in Das Experiment and the visitors to the MOMA exhibition ceased being subjects in an experiment or visitors to a museum, and momentarily became actors; the “artifice” of science and art blurring with the reality of the everyday on a variety of levels.

  Figure 2: Standard 35mm footage.

  Figure 3: Split screen CCTV.

  Similar cinematic dislocations and reunifications of architectural space, on the one hand, and concomitant modifications to behaviour, on the other, were repeated in Jump Cuts, a Diller and Scofidio installation staged at a more conventional architectural location: the Cineplex complex in San Jose (California, 1995) (Fig. 4). Again, this piece involved the use of cameras to monitor the public. Video cameras were placed on the building’s interior and a series of twelve TV screens were hung from a temporary framework on the building’s exterior facade. The internal cameras were positioned above, or to the sides, of the multiple escalators located on the inside and consequently filmed people from above, but also in profile. As with Para-Site, behaviour within the architectural set was conditioned by the use of cameras as a surrogate for physical observation, visitors either hiding or “performing”. Beyond questions of behaviour, and the conversion of physical space into a cinematographically observed phenomenon, however, we see here the creation of a literal and visually complex cinematic architecture.

  By effectively turning the facade into a screen, Diller and Scofidio electronically turned the building inside out and upside down, before reconfiguring it as a series of images on the outside.13 The screen effect was one of horizontal and vertical movement in a lineal format on the facade, as the screens were arranged so that the movement of the people always flowed in the same direction, whether it had been filmed from above of the side. Mixed with images from films, the building was animated by a series of moving human images that turned the static physical object into a complex mediated rearrangement of its interior space. Just as with the MOMA installation and, to an extent Das Experiment, Jump Cuts creates a complex, intermingled cinematic architectural aesthetic, a hybrid physical and mediated experience, and, in addition, invokes specific changes to behaviour that raise broader questions about the nature and effects of video surveillance in contemporary cultures.

  A less adventurous design that involved a similar combination of filmic imagery and physical building was their conversion of the Brasserie restaurant at the foot of Mies Van de Rohe’s Seagram Building, New York.14 After the destruction by fire of Philip Johnson’s original design in 1995, the completely new Diller and Scofidio project was opened the following year. Occupying a solid concrete shell with no windows to the outside, the restaurant basically turns its back on the exterior. In the Diller and Scofidio project, this characteristic is turned into the design’s principal feature. By setting up a mediated interaction between the inside and the outside through, what for them is, a very typical use of CCTV cameras, they set up another mediated interaction with architectural space. Video cameras are placed outside the building to monitor the street and entrance to the restaurant, and the resultant footage is relayed on a bank of fifteen monitors placed behind the bar on the inside.

  Figure 4: Diller and Scofidio Jump Cuts: cinematic architectural facade.

  Given the positioning of the cameras, the interior monitors tend to show images of guests who are about to enter the restaurant and, as a result, the public again become aware of surveillance as their arrival is announced on the inside. The same self-consciousness, documented in their other projects, inevitably follows whilst, visually, the exterior is again reconnected, and blurred, with the interior. As with the Jump Cuts installation, their playful use of visioning technology literally turns the building inside out and creates the type of dual engagement between physical space and filmic image that characterises all their work and finds clear resonances in Das Experiment; just as our engagement, as viewers, with Hirschbiegel’s architecture is inevitably based on film, so too in the projects of Diller and Scofidio. Furthermore, the aesthetic effect created by their architecture is also resonant with the cinematic effect created by Hirschbiegel. By using footage of different types the director overlays one mediated aesthetic on another. In the work of Diller and Scofidio, this may be less obvious but is also repeated in the overlaying of the building’s physical aesthetic with that created by the mediated screen image superimposed on it.15

  The conceptual and aesthetic analogies between the works dealt with here are then multiple in nature. They are, however, also sociopolitical. Beyond the specific context of the installation or building project, Diller and Scofidio reference much broader social trends through their site-specific cinematographic architecture. Physical surveillance through CCTV is omnipresent today with certain cities, London being a prime example, having very few “camera-free” streets. It is not only the urban environment that is “observed” through the cameras however, schools, hospitals, car parks, buses, trains and taxis all have CCTV. The result is that almost every “public space” is a space of surveillance and thus under “control”. The need for “total surveillance” of buildings, streets and, indeed, entire cities is now an issue that affects architects and urban designers like never before. In attempts to ensure security, designers and urban planners are often obliged to design in such a way that no areas of “optical insecurity” are allowed. The aim is a risk-free environment.16 What also results, however, is an inevitable loss of privacy and a limitation on the nature of architectural spaces that can be designed; the view from the camera becoming a defining factor in design.

  Diller and Scofidio’s installations and architecture clearly offer commentaries on this situation, which, for some, has become one of the defining characteristics of modern architecture, urbanism and society, and whilst these comments may be interlaced with numerous other themes and intentions, they are central to their underlying arguments. The same thing can be said of Das Experiment, which, whilst primarily taking on questions of psychology and social conformity, opens up a door to this question in both a darker and a more direct way than Diller and Scofidio. The prison is a mock-up that the director shows us in model form and whose structure he exposes in various “behind the scenes” shots. It has, however, been designed so that every inch of the space can be observed, if not by the physically present guards, then by the remotely present experiment team and their CCTV cameras. Seen in this light, the architectural set created for Das Experiment becomes interpretable as a prototype for a form of future architecture in which the rule of surveillance dominates over all else. It becomes a form of architecture that is continually and wholly mediated by the camera; a form of architecture that Diller and Scofidio have tentatively begun to explore in the “real world” of physical spaces and buildings.

  Notes

  1The Stanford Experiment is a now infamous event in the history of experimental psychology. Organised by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University in August 1971, the Stanford Experiment was a prison simulation in which twenty-four undergraduates, selected from seventy candidates, were chosen to take on the roles of guards and prisoners during a two-week period. They were to live in a mock-up prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building with the aim of monitoring the level of their engagement with a social role that was assigned to them. Within si
x days the experiment was abandoned as guards almost instantly took on their roles and actually went even further, engaging in the sometimes cruel and brutal treatment of inmates. The inmates too were seen to absorb themselves in the roles they had been assigned; they exhibited passive responses to the treatment they received that, in some cases, was suspected as leading to serious psychological damage. See: Zimbardo, Philip and Musen, Ken. Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Documentary film, Stanford University, California, 1992.

  2Subsequently, the experiment has been subject to numerous reappraisals in which its basic premise has been questioned. One such example examines whether the selection process was balanced towards attracting “inherently” violent participants. See: Carnahan, Thomas and McFarland, Sam. “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. New York, April 17, 2007.

  3Some portrayals of the maltreatment meted out to prisoners were also based on facts such as their being sprayed with fire extinguishers and being forced to wash toilets with their bare hands. In other ways, however, the references to the real events are merely echoed; the use of a female character in the psychology team who places pressure on the lead scientist to abandon the experiment for example. This would seem to be an indirect reference to Christina Maslach, the graduate student who persuaded Zimbardo to abort the original experiment. Similarly, the forms of psychological pressure used by the guards: loud music, arbitrary exercises and name calling, etc., are inevitably variations on the techniques actually used. Das Experiment thus occupies a delicate ground between reality and fiction and consequently becomes an analogy of its own theme; a situation, in which real people lose their bearings in defining what, for them, is reality or fiction. The official website for the Stanford Prison Experiment offers an overview of the events. See: www.prisonexp.org.

  4Stemming from the very core idea of Existentialism, Sartre describes time and time again in both his academic and literary texts, our fight against the inherent human condition of freedom. In an existential world in which the only arbiter of meaning is ourselves, we are, in Sartre’s terms, “condemned to be free”; in other words, condemned to take responsibility for our actions. Human existence is for Sartre a never-ending series of games to avoid this responsibility. Hence, we take on roles, and even emotions, to allow us to displace responsibility for ourselves onto external expectations or internally motivated but uncontrollable emotions. Das Experiment presents us with a whole series of characters that displace the reasons for their behaviour onto the roles imposed upon them, and they look to external factors to guide them in their decisions and excuse their behaviour. It is seen most evidently in the guards in the film but also emerges in some of the prisoners. They are, in Sartre’s terms, inauthentic. It is a form of bad faith. See: Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness, Routledge Classics, Edition 2003. p. 70–94.

  5Severe punishment often unleashed violent tendencies in those it was intended to intimidate, simply augmenting the feeling of violence and arbitrary rule associated with the state. Prison, by contrast, shifted the focus of public attention from the punishment of a criminal to his trial. This became the public arena in which state rule showed its face to the public. That face was one of regulated, measured and fair judgment. The shift from punishment to discipline that Foucault investigated was then simply a new, more effective tactic in the mechanisms of control. See: Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin Books, London, 1979. p. 104–131.

  6Bentham’s designs for the Panopticon prison were never realised by the designer himself, although many variations on this principal would be constructed in the following decades. Key to his plan was the central positioning of an observer and a radial arrangement of prisoners around this point. For an overview, see: Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings, M. Bozovic (ed), Verso, London, 1995.

  7Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Ibid. p. 135.

  8Lyon, David (ed), Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, William Publishing, Devon, 2006. p. 3.

  9Panopticon is now a word used as much to describe technological surveillance as it is to describe physical surveillance; computer databases, mobile phones and credit cards, etc. all allow for inordinate amounts of “information monitoring” in today’s societies. CCTV cameras are thus only the most obvious and visible manifestations of this new “surveillance society”. For a full overview of how this question has been dealt with, see: Armstrong, Gary and Norris, Clive. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, Berg Publishers, London, 1999.

  10In this regard, Das Experiment echoes concerns that run throughout the writings of Paul Virilio with regard to the camera’s ability to eliminate the “need for and physical experience of real spaces”. In Polar Inertia, he gives numerous examples of this, which he defines as the replacing of public space by the public image. Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia, SAGE Publications, London, 2000. p. 11. In other books he deals with this and related issues on how the mediated image effects both optical perception and our understanding and use of architectural, urban, rural and transportation spaces. See also: Open Sky, Verso, London, 1997; The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1994; The Aesthetic of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), New York, 1991.

  11For a general introduction to their work, see: Incerti, Guido, Ricchi, Daria and Simpson, Deane. Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro). The Ciliary Function: Works and Projects 1979–2007, Skira, Boston, 2008; Diller, Elizabeth and Scofidio, Ricardo. Flesh: Architectural Probes, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996.

  12Incerti, Guido, Ricchi, Daria and Simpson, Deane. Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro). The Ciliary Function: Works and Projects 1979-2007, Ibid. p. 35.

  13Wines, Suzan. “Go with the Flow”. Domus. No. 801, February 1998. Milan. p. 88.

  14Yoshida, Nobuyuki (ed). “Diller + Scofidio: The Brasserie”. A+U, Tokyo, 5 January 2005. p. 70–71.

  15As with Das Experiment then, the aesthetic created and the themes dealt with by Diller and Scofidio resonate with the work of Paul Virilio, who they identify themselves as a significant reference point. In particular, we find references to Virilian concepts such as the “automisation of perception”, the “mechanisation of sight” and the “standardisation of vision”; Open Sky, Ibid. p. 89–92. Also, see ideas such as “tele-reality”, the “tele-site or tele-location”; Polar Inertia, Ibid. p. 2–7.

  16McCahill, Mike. The Surveillance Web: The Rise of Surveillance in an English City. Willian Publishing, Devon, 2002. p. 13.

  The “cut” in the architecture of Jean Nouvel and the scenery of Ken Adam

  You Only Live Twice. 1967

  Lewis Gilbert

  Producer: United Artists. (UK).

  You Only Live Twice, starring Sean Connery and directed by Lewis Gilbert, was the fifth Bond film of the Eon Productions series and the fifth in as many years. Preceded by Dr No, 1962, and then From Russia with Love, 1963, Goldfinger, 1964, and Thunderball, 1965, it had all the attributes of its predecessors, such as high-octane action, political intrigue, incredible technological gadgetry, fantastical architectural sets, heaps of sexual innuendo and witty one-line jokes from the coolest secret agent in the Western world. Its premier was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, and it grossed $43 million in the United States and over $111 million worldwide. It was typical Bond.1 As with the previous films, the set designs were on a scale unimaginable for anything but the highest budget blockbusters of the day, and were widely celebrated for both their technical audaciousness and their aesthetic qualities. Designed by Ken Adam, originally a student of architecture who entered the world of set design in the 1940s, they were in-line with his other set designs for Goldfinger, Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me, all of which led to BAFTA nominations.

  During the same period, Adam actually won BAFTA’s for his set designs in Dr. Strangelove and the IPCRESS File, and later creat
ed celebrated sets on films like Barry Lyndon and the Madness of King George. In 2002, he received the Art Directors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award, three years after his work had been subject of a retrospective in the Serpentine Gallery, London. His architectural sets for the Bond films have often been described as “architectural fantasy” or a “symbolic and visionary image” of the future.2 Indeed, in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition of his work at the Serpentine, his designs are compared to that of the contemporary and historical architects Daniel Libeskind, Piranesi and Etienne-Louis Boullée; designers also known for their semi-futuristic and “visionary” architecture.3

  Whether such comparisons genuinely reveal much about his work, or the period in which they were designed, is debatable. Nevertheless, they certainly indicate the key role they played in creating the appropriate futuristic, fantastic and spectacular setting for the extravaganza of the early 007 missions.4 In this particular adventure, Bond finds himself immersed in a conspiracy organised by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) and his subversive organisation SPECTRE, whose objective is to provoke the third world war between the United States and the then Soviet Union. This storyline, more than a little unbelievable of course, becomes totally farcical when one considers the strategy chosen; nothing less than the hijacking and theft of a space craft in full stratospheric flight. The intention of Blofeld is to provoke the two superpowers into accusing one another of Cold War galactic sabotage and, in the climate of mutual recriminations that would follow, to engage in a nuclear war of total destruction. It is the mission of Bond, together with his usual band of cohorts, Bernard Lee in the role of “M”, Lois Maxwell as Miss Money Penny and Desmond Llewelyn as “Q”, to resolve the puzzle and save the world from its destiny of nuclear annihilation.