The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  The aesthetic of visual confrontation this produces is evident in projects such as OmniLife, Guadalajara, The Business and Congress City, Barcelona and the Guggenheim Museum proposal, Tokyo, to name but a few. The Guadalajara project formed part of a development for a 600 acre cultural and commercial centre located on the outskirts of the city and intended to operate as a catalyst for regeneration.5 The Nouvel proposal was based on the idea of extending one of the parks on the site, so that it blends with the office complex. The design visuals show nature apparently reclaiming and overgrowing a series of buildings constructed under a canopy some 10 to 15 metres high. Penetrated by trees and vegetation planted at ground level, the canopy would offer both shade from the sun and protection from rain. Its combination of vegetation and canopy would create a series of interesting shadow effects on the buildings and site below and, in addition, produce a “mutually contaminating” aesthetic analogous to Reggio’s imagery in Koyaanisqatsi (Fig. 6).

  Figure 6: Proposal for Omnilife Complex, Guadalajara, Mexico.

  Similar objectives and characteristics are found in Nouvel’s proposal for The Business and Congress City in Barcelona. This project envisaged the redevelopment of a desolate site on the outskirts of the city that would become a “natural oasis” in a semi-urban space.6 Nouvel’s scheme proposed a series of buildings grouped around a large, fully vegetated atrium, envisaged as “a garden brimming with light and shade that would produce its own micro-climate”. In the case of the Guggenheim Museum proposal for Tokyo, the building envisaged was to be completely covered with vegetation. A steel structure composed of curved columns and beams, it would be covered with turf so as to appear to be a naturally formed mound or hill that would cover a series of modular spaces beneath. The only indications of its architectural function were to be a large rectangular window cut into one side and the totemic mast that emits electronically generated images positioned to the side. It has been described as “the use of artifice and nature as a strategy for an alternative form of existence in the urban collage of Tokyo” (Fig. 7).7

  Figure 7: Guggenheim Museum Proposal, Tokyo: nature and architecture.

  The aesthetic and formal possibilities that emerge from the contrasting of nature and architecture seen in these projects is something that has come to the fore in his more recent work. It was, however, evident in some of his earlier works as well, with the French Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, 1989, and the Cartier Foundation (Paris, 1995), being examples. In Venice, a gridded cube-like structure was to be embedded into the ground with one side completely open8, whilst at the Cartier Foundation, a “glass box and free standing glass facade” are placed in a park and surrounded by trees, resulting in a game of reflections in which the building appears to blend with the surrounding vegetation.9 In all of these projects, we see the deliberate juxtaposition of architecture and nature in ways that resonate with the formal qualities and thematic concepts found in Reggio’s film.

  Despite these characteristics, projects like the Cartier Foundation and the French Pavilion were produced at a time in which the theoretical works of Nouvel were focused in another direction, such as optical perception and the visual language of cinema. Revolving around two principal themes, the notion of sequence and the incorporation of visual cinematic effects into our experience of architecture, Nouvel’s early interest in the possible relationship between cinema and architecture produced a number of unusual visual effects. The question of sequence, and thus movement and time in the architectural experience, is something we have already covered. Discussed in the context of the cut, and its potential application to the creative visual imagination of the architect, we mentioned its analogous employment in the notion of the architectural threshold. Other cinematic effects and characteristics that Nouvel has attempted to mimic through architecture, however, include the dissolve, the fade and the frame.

  One reading that emerges from his manipulation of reflections at the Cartier Foundation is the creation of the cinematic effect of the dissolve. Dealt with in detail in the final section of this work, it is a reading that sees the overlaying of reflections on the building’s facade with views inside the building itself, as analogous to the dissolve. At the Judicial City Project (Nantes, 2000), it is the cinematic frame and framing techniques that get referenced; the building’s clearly defined framed structure is used to frame views and demarcate zones in the main entrance hall. In one sense, this simply focuses the eye and ensures that the architect can focus the attention of building users in a way analogous to a film director like Reggio, but it also allows him to create depth planes which demarcate actions in what amounts to a “deep space composition”.10

  At the Institute of the Arab World (Paris, 1987), the Reggio-like cinematic effect that Nouvel references is based on ambiguity in questions of scale and distance. This project, a cultural centre housing museum and exhibition spaces, a library, a documentation centre, children’s workshops, conference facilities and an auditorium, was one of Nouvel’s first projects to receive international attention. It responds to its immediate urban context by following the curve of the Seine on one side, but cuts itself off from that context on the other to create a public square. The square side facade, in effect a single screen composed of mobile diaphragms of identical openings, allows no views to the interior, reveals no conventional windows and gives no indication of floor-to-ceiling heights.11 It thus eliminates scale references that are intended to momentarily confuse the eye (Fig. 8) with regard to size and distance in much the same way that Reggio does in his own compositional games. In the DuMont Schauberg project, Cologne, this game with scale takes on a different form and revolves around the superimposition of semi-transparent words on the facade of each floor of the glazed building.12 Opening up views to the interior, but then superimposing variant visual references on those views, Nouvel again proposes to “confuse the eye”. Superimposed on the facade, between regular floor-to-ceiling heights, are a series of differently sized texts which set up different scale references between graphic letters, building facade and the human figures seen on the inside. The effect is one of a pulsating, variable screen effect.

  The combination of these optical effects has been described by Alejandro Zaera as “an architecture of dimensionality and superposition”.13 Whilst not all of these effects of dimensionality and superposition have been explicitly referenced back to cinematic effects by Nouvel himself, they all operate in line with his overall interest in the new visual language offered by film, which he describes as having taught architects “to think in sequence”.14 Beyond thinking in sequence however, Nouvel clearly raids the visual lexicon of film, explicitly referencing the cut, the dissolve and editing in general, as a cinematic device translatable to the architectural experience. By considering his architectural use of these techniques, in conjunction with the cinematic effects in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, we can begin to see just how varied these techniques are. We also get a sense of just how their translation from the realm of film into the realm of architecture can operate. The effects we focused on in Koyaanisqatsi were not ones dependent exclusively on the technology of the medium itself, rather, we chose to identify those that involve a recreation of cinematic effects through a manipulation of objects, movement, frames and point of view, precisely the none cinematic tools available to Nouvel. When we add to this the aesthetic analogies we began with, the work of Godfrey Reggio becomes an ideal frame through which to better understand some of the peculiarities of Jean Nouvel’s architectural vocabulary; a vocabulary of aesthetic contrasts operating within the visual syntax of cinema.

  Figure 8: The DuMont Schauberg: a facade of conflicting scales.

  Notes

  1Pearse, Gregory and Pearse, Maria. Godfrey Reggio’s “Naqoyqatsi”: a Requiem for Humanity. www.cinemaseekers.com. 2003. Accessed 16/05/2012.

  2For an introduction to independent filmmaking, see: Holmlund, Christine and Wyatt, Justin (eds), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the M
argins to the Mainstream, Routledge, New York, 2004.

  3For an introduction to sound in film, see: Kalinak, Kathryn. Film Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press USA, New York, 2010.

  4For an introduction to cinematic effects such as these, see: Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001. p. 156–287.

  5Other projects that form part of this complex include a Daniel Libeskind designed Research Centre, a Museum of Contemporary Art by Toyo Ito and a Children’s Museum and Amusement Park by Philip Johnson. For more information, see: Márquez Cecilia, Fernando and Levene, Richard (eds), “Omnilife Offices Complex”. In: Jean Nouvel (ed), El Croquis, 1994–2002, Jean Nouvel, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 2002. p.164–173.

  6For more information on this, and other Spanish projects of Jean Nouvel, see: Jean Nouvel. Exhibition Catalogue, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Ediciones Aldeasa, Madrid, 2002.

  7Márquez Cecilia, Fernando and Levene, Richard. (eds), “Guggenhein Museum, Tokyo”. In: Jean Nouvel (ed), El Croquis, 1994 2002, Jean Nouvel, Ibid. p. 314.

  8Nouvel, Jean. Jean Nouvel: His Recent Works 1987 1990, Quaderns Monografies, Barcelona, 1990. p. 89.

  9Márquez Cecilia, Fernando and Levene, Richard (eds), El Croquis, 1987–1998, Jean Nouvel, El Croquis Editoriales, Madrid, 1998. p. 234–246.

  10For an introduction to depth of field, see: Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001. p. 178–182.

  11Cecilia, Fernando and Levene, Richard (eds), El Croquis, 1987–1998, Ibid. p. 53.

  12Boissière, Olivier. Jean Nouvel, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1997. p. 136.

  13Zaera, Alejandro. “Institute of the Arab World”. In: Fernando Márquez Cecilia and Richard Levene (eds), El Croquis, 1987–1998, Ibid. p. 53.

  14Nicolin, Pierluigi (ed), Jean Nouvel Film Director and Architect, Lotus 84, Milan, 1995. p. 129.

  Boullée on film: An architectural cinematography

  The Belly of an Architect. 1987

  Peter Greenaway

  Producer: Tangram Film/Mondial. (UK).

  The Belly of an Architect was Peter Greenaway’s fourth major release. Premiered in 1987, it proved to be one of his least controversial films, but also one of his most commercially successful. By contrast, other films from the Greenaway canon such as The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover or The Baby of Macon, to name but two, were surrounded in controversy. The first has scenes of cannibalism and scatological degradation, whilst the second begins with a gruesome multiple rape scene. Compared to these brutal and, for many, misogynistic films, The Belly of an Architect is patently mundane. The most sexually explicit scene is viewed from a key hole and involves little more than distant shots of foreplay, whilst its most violent scene involves a 57-year-old man giving a bloody nose to a disrespectful youth. That said, the film has all the visual tropes and intellectual references that have come to make Greenaway’s films critical, if not commercial, successes. Amongst these characteristics are its masterly and symbolic use of colour, its use of ancient paintings as the basis for its compositional arrangements, and its skillful use of architecture as both a backdrop and a symbolic component of certain scenes.1

  In terms of its narrative structure, the film again shows typical Greenaway tropes in its constant use of symbolism, its complex interwoven plot structure, its lewd characters and its use of metaphorical and literal analogy; often through a simple process of juxtaposition and contrast.2 The film’s most obvious contrast and analogy is its central concept; the mirroring of the film’s protagonist, Stanley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), with the French Enlightenment architect, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1728–1799. Narratively, the film follows the attempts made by Kracklite, an American architect, to put on an exhibition of Boullée’s architectural projects and drawings at the Capitoline Hill War Museum, Rome. It soon becomes apparent that the exhibition has become an obsession for Kracklite, who begins finding various parallels in his own life and that of Boullée; something that is unsympathetically played upon by some of his Italian contemporaries who point out that both he and Boullée “built very little and are relatively unknown in Italy”.3

  As Kracklite’s frustration with the exhibition builds, so too does his obsessions and hypochondriac tendencies. Suffering from what turns out to be cancer, he initially feels some pain in his stomach. He becomes convinced that his younger wife, Louisa (Chloe Webb), who is cheating on him with the handsome young treasurer of the exhibition, Caspian, is also trying to poison him. On this basis the analogies in the film multiply and expand beyond references to Boullée as Kracklite begins an obsession with the fate of the emperor, seeks his statues around the city, and steals postcards of his sculpted bust. He later enlarges these postcard images on a photocopier until they are lifesize. The copied drawings then become another obsession, as Kracklite begins to draw the Emperor Augustus, also supposedly poisoned by his wife. Kracklite visits the tomb of the emperor and what he imagines to be growing inside his own cancer ridden stomach on the photocopied stomach of Augustus. Later in the film, he takes to drawing Platonic geometric forms on this surrogate X-ray and thus refers us not only to his obsession with his health, but his equally strong obsession with Boullée and his architecture.

  As is typical of Greenaway, the film’s narrative references and themes are repeated visually with, in this case, cinematic shots composed so as to echo neoclassical painting and architecture. One example is the scene in which Kracklite is forced to undergo an internal examination in a Roman hospital. Placed on the hospital bed in the centre of the composition, he is about to undergo a procedure that will reveal the cause of his discomfort and ultimate death. Greenaway turns the shot into a pictorial composition reminiscent of Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, 1787, with Kracklite centrally located on a treatment table and surrounded by attendants. He also references Jacques Louis David in a later bathing scene in which Kracklite claims to be attempting suicide, only this time, it is David’s Death of Marat that is drawn into the film’s repertoire of external references through a similar game of theme, composition and colour similitudes.4

  A variation of this referential game manifests itself in the scene in which a heart attack is staged as a publicity stunt for the exhibition. Here, we are presented with two conversations and sets of actions taking place simultaneously; Kracklite is placed on the upper balcony of a building against a pure white background and is positioned centrally in the shot whilst discussing architectural questions of theory and philosophy. Directly below, his wife, dressed in red and seated on a red sofa, flirts with Caspian and talks of frivolities and illicit love affairs. Cutting between both conversations, the scene highlights the contrast between the characters and underlines the psychological and narrative differences between the two events pictorially, through intricately staging two contrasting colours and formal compositions.5

  More directly, architectural references are evident in the picnic scene, set in the ruins of the Villa Adriana. Here, the ruined architectural backdrop (Fig. 1) from antiquity, its overgrown classical columns, crumbling walls, half-collapsed domes and abandoned decorative motifs, reminded us most directly of Piranesi; a contemporary of Boullée and a figure central to the promotion of Neoclassical architecture in the eighteenth century. Filmed in close-up and long shot, the sequence is interlaced with a Kracklite monologue in which the contents of one of his postcards to Boullée overlays images of him walking through the back corridors of the Villa and its bath complex. Vomiting, doubling up in pain and being followed by a stray dog, the sequence of architectural ruins becomes symbolic of his own physical health and state of mind. Another scene of this nature is set in a sauna in which the architectural backdrop is used to frame the action and emphasise the “dramatic content” of the moment. In this particular case, we find resonances with Raphael’s School of Athens, 1509, in
its treatment of colour, selection of scene, compositional arrangement and Neoclassical architectural backdrop.

  Figure 1: Picnic scene at the Villa Adriana.

  Figure 2: Welcoming dinner at the Pantheon.

  Figure 3: Cenotaph to Isaac Newton, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1784.

  Further variations on these themes are evident in the party held to welcome Kracklite to Rome. Here, the protagonists sit in a straight line directly in front of the Pantheon. As if in perfect harmony with the building’s facade, they are arrayed in a perfect, centrally divided composition within which we also see the fountain in the Piazza de la Rotunda. Shot at night, the whole scene is illuminated with a red tinted light that is picked up in the colour of Kracklite’s shirt, and gives the whole ensemble an extra-dramatic touch. Placed on the centre of the table is a cake in the form of Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton which becomes a motif repeated in the film’s finale (Figs. 2–3). Through both its architectural setting and its compositional arrangement, the scene transposes the formal characteristics of classical and Neoclassical painting and architecture to the film’s visual ensemble. The various shots of the Capitoline Hill War Museum offer even more examples of similar cinematographic representations, in which the formal and symbolic qualities of its architecture are foregrounded with pictorial and narrative ends.