The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  5In his seminal text, Lefebvre rejects the notion of some sort of ideal space; spaces, cities or buildings conceived, designed and built by an architect as pure artistic creations without any interference from external material forces. Lefebvre defines such spaces, together with abstract philosophical definitions of Cartesian space, as attempts to divorce space from what he calls social practices. Examples of what social practices may be include the state’s desire to eliminate pockets of social anarchy, as with Haussmann’s designs for Paris under Napoleon III. It may also include a property developer’s need for quick and immediate profit and thus the endless selection of repetitive architectural forms and models. It may also include a manufacturer’s desire to promote the use of a given building material or element such as glass, steel and concrete, as per case in the first half of the twentieth century. See: Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Blackwell, London, 1974. p. 8.

  6By the time Mourenx was built, the world of architectural urbanism had become dominated by CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) and its notion this future city as laid out in its 1938 manifesto, The Athens Charter. The Future City it envisaged, often referred to as The Functional City, was to be based on four points of doctrine: the division of the city into four zones for habitation, work, play and circulation. See: CIAM. La carta de Atenas, Editorial Contémpora, Argentina, 1957. p. 123.

  7Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928 1960, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000. p. 59.

  8Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Ibid. p. 49.

  9The application of mass-production factory techniques would theoretically lead to economies of scale but were also premised on mass-repetition. Seen by defenders as representative of a new spirit, this aesthetic would be applied to buildings of all types, from town halls to houses and offices to churches. For a detailed overview of the sociopolitical themes involved, see: Gartman, David. From Autos to Architecture: Fordism and Architectural Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2009.

  10In their attempts to understand, explain and ultimately subvert the role of socially produced space on everyday life, the dérive was used by the Situationists as a key concept. Apparently aimless meanderings through the city, they were intended as a reaction against the controlling tendencies of modern architecture and urbanism which was seen as attempting to control the experience of the city, particularly in new towns, through defined pathways, routes, zones and areas in preordained ways. The dérive was intended to open up this experience to uncontrolled and unplanned events, opportunities and coincidences. See: Andreoti, Libero. “Architecture and Play”. In: T. McDonough (ed), Guy Debord and the Situationist International, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004. p. 213–222.

  11Part and parcel of the dérive was the psychogeographical mapping of the urban experience; the documentation and recording of moods, atmospheres, uses, events and activities that took place in urban spaces, streets, squares, parks, pathways, etc. It was an attempt to examine the effects the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, had on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. Counteracting the preordained uses of the city through the dérive was intended to open up new and unexpected psychogeographical relationships. See: McDonough, Thomas and McDonough, Thomas. In: A. Libero (ed), Situationists; Art Politics, Urbanism, Ibid. p. 56.

  12See: Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Sage Publications, London, 1998 (Original publication, 1970).

  13Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle and Other Films, Rebel Press, London, 1992. p. 61.

  14Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life, Verso, London, 2002. p. 3.

  15Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Ibid. p. 34.

  16Détournement had its origins in the collage but, as argued by Libero Andreotti, unlike the collage it was envisaged as something that was endlessly repeatable and applicable to a number of contexts; cinema, writing art and even the urban environment. A prime example of which was the reappropriation of the Halles Centrales, Paris, between 1969 and 1971. For a brief period the building, designed for the distribution of food, was effectively occupied by artists who imposed new actions and events upon it. See: Andreotti, Libero. Situationists; Art Politics, Urbanism, Actar, Barcelona, 1997. p. 28.

  17In this regard, Tati follows the trends set by vaudeville film comedians. In particular Buster Keaton, whose films often involved the use of architecture to reveal and conceal comic narrative information in different depth planes. For a description of this, see: Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen. Film Art: An Introduction, McGraw Hill, New York, 2001. p. 184–189.

  18The numerous interchanges of location, action and movement seen in this sequence is, in many ways, a comic representation of what the architectural theorist Rob Shields has described as architectural syntax. In his analysis of this syntax, Shields recalls again the ideas of Henri Lefebvre. Starting with what Lefebvre described as the consumption of space, its use by people, Shields describes the movements of people in buildings in terms that perfectly define what is seen in Playtime; “a ballet of movements, choreographed rhythms and corporal gestures, each one of which is coordinated with the space in which it is carried out”. See: Shields, Rob. Architecture as a God. Architectural Design Profile: Consuming Architecture, No. 131, London, 1998. p. 95.

  Venturi and Antonioni: The modern city and the phenomenon of the moving image

  Zabriskie Point. 1970

  Michelangelo Antonioni

  Producer: United International Pictures S.L. (USA).

  Zabriskie Point was the second film of a trilogy Michelangelo Antonioni made with the American studio MGM. The first, Blow Up (1966), was a major economic and critical success. Zabriskie Point (1972) was a complete failure on both counts. The third, The Passenger (1975), did not achieve the international recognition of Blow Up but did re-establish the director’s reputation to some extent after the complete flop of Zabriskie Point. Despite its commercial and critical failure, the film is still considered to be one of Antonioni’s most ambitious and, in some ways, his most cinematographically successful venture.1 Taking on the iconic social and political situation of the United States in the second part of the 1960s, Antonioni offers an outsider’s view of a society in conflict with itself. The director presents the viewer with images of demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, the racial policy of certain states, the overriding political fear of communism and, above all, what Jean Baudrillard called, the consumer society.2

  Given that MGM is not an institution with any great interest in promoting radical social change, one has to assume that they simply saw Zabriskie Point as an opportunity to “cash in” on the perceived radical tendencies of the film’s youthful audience. In this light, it could be argued that Zabriskie Point is a film based on a rather obvious irony. It is a money-making exercise based on an explicit criticism of the economic conditions in which it itself operates. It thus becomes a manifestation of what Noam Chomsky has defined as the necessary illusion; the acceptance, and even promotion, of a certain level of criticism within the capitalist democratic system which, as long as it does not challenge any of the fundamental tenants of that system, is accepted for the illusion of freedom it creates.3

  However, despite its sociopolitical overtones, the narrative of Zabriskie Point was in many ways typical of his previous work. It investigated a romantic relationship between two lovers apparently alienated from the society that surrounds them; in this case, Mark (Mark Frecette) and Daria (Daria Halpin). They meet in the desert having escaped from the city of Los Angeles, in a plane and a car, respectively. Having been implicated in the death of a policeman, Mark has stolen a plane and flies aimlessly to explore some of the most spectacular scenery of the United States, which Antonioni captures with appropriately evocative filming. Daria, the daughter of a wealthy property developer, seeks a similar adventure whilst making her way to the family retreat. Upon meeting, they begin a short, inten
se and, at times, erotic relationship that Antonioni again captures in a memorable, if occasionally, obvious surrealist sequence.

  Using the respective stories of these protagonists, the director takes the viewer on a journey from the modern commercialised and violent city to the silent, tranquil and “spiritual” desert. The inherent power of this landscape revolves around the naturally isolated, inhospitable and desolate set that the director uses to explore the “interior and existential” world of his actors. In the seemingly metaphysical environment of the desert, Antonioni suggests that they transcend their everyday consumer lives in the city. In order to emphasise the juxtaposition of his two principal settings, he employs significantly different filming techniques. The desert scenes generally employ longer takes and long shots, which underline the expansiveness of the rural landscape, whilst the city is explored through rapid cutting and complex overloaded compositions, often filmed in close-up or medium shots. Despite these cinematographic differences, the cinematography employed on both locations do share one quintessential Antonioni characteristic: a strict compositional control of almost every shot.4

  Despite the apparent formlessness of the desert setting, the director still positions his actors in specific points in relation to their background and, consequently, they are full of isolated shots that have clear “pictorial qualities”. This common feature of the director’s oeuvre is also found in the shots of the city, in which a much more intricate and complex background setting is used to frame actions in a very similar way. In the city however, it is not the undulating lines of distant mountains that blend with the actors, but rather roadside advertising images, commercial shop windows and promotional murals painted on walls.5 The constant presentation of luxurious consumerist images, large-scale corporate logos, outlandish advertising slogans and commercial architecture creates the impression of a completely artificial landscape into which the actors are placed as somewhat insignificant components.

  The nature and history of this urban landscape was, by the early 1970s, a hot architectural issue. It had long been questioned by urbanists such as Jane Jacobs6 and the giant of American landscape architecture J.B. Jackson, who described it as based on “a lack of long term goals and constant adjustment to circumstance”.7 As has been noted by various authors, this particular theme was being dealt with at the same time from a European perspective, most notably by Reyner Banham.8 Banham even made a BBC documentary titled Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, 1972. Although one could not say that either J.B. Jackson or Jane Jacobs “loved LA”, they certainly saw it as an urban model that was not to be wholly criticised and rejected, as seems to have been the perspective of Antonioni. On the contrary, all three of these urban/architectural critics celebrated certain aspects of urban LA.

  Figures 1–2: Compositional control in the city.

  Many of the arguments around the contemporary North American urban environment were to form part of the work developed by another of the leading US theorists of the time, Robert Venturi. Although Venturi made his name as a theorist with the publication of Complexity and Contradiction (1966), it is Learning from Las Vegas (1972) that most directly deals with the question of the “commercial city” as represented by Antonioni. Furthermore, he dealt with it as a “city in motion” which, as we shall discuss, was central to Zabriskie Point. In attempting to analyse, and thus understand Las Vegas, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour laid out a series of the city’s particular characteristics, as well as offering an explanation as to why they developed it. Amongst these was the fact that the city plan is based on a regular grid that gives the streets a certain architectural order. However, they highlighted that this order gets completely lost due to the complexity and spectacular nature of the individual buildings built along it; buildings that owe their forms to the commercial imperatives of a city based on service industries.

  In short, Learning from Las Vegas argues that the need for bars, restaurants, hotels and casinos to be visible and eye catching, results in the visual cacophony of the street in which signage is often more important than buildings. This characteristic is inevitably augmented by the tendency to set back the buildings of the strip from the actual road side, the end result being the architecture of the “decorated shed”9. The importance of these ideas were not to be felt immediately, but did become central in the 1980s when thinkers like Charles Jencks used them in the broader context of architectural postmodernism.10 In spite of the eventual general importance of Learning from Las Vegas in this regard, the aspect of the work that is of most relevance here is its musings on the role and importance of the car to the contemporary American city. In this context, a number of issues emerge. For example, the necessity of accommodating large numbers of car users was seen as leading to the provision of car parking space which, in order to facilitate easy building access, was placed in front of the building. Resulting in the relegation of the building itself to a secondary level, this becomes a principal factor in explaining the development of the decorated shed as a typology.11

  In addition to the car-building typology of Las Vegas however, Venturi also examined the grid system of the city’s roads, which followed the model laid out by earlier train lines and concomitant land development. On the one hand, this enabled the city to expand physically whilst, on the other, facilitated the use of the car. In turn, it allowed for ever-growing distances between buildings, what J.B. Jackson called the decentralisation of the American city.12 In short, cities like the Las Vegas of Venturi and Los Angeles of Antonioni had developed according to the logic of the automobile, and, as Reyner Banham argued, in order to understand such cities, it is necessary to understand the requirements of the car driver. Indeed, it is necessary to drive.13 One of the consequences of this was that cities like Las Vegas, and in a slightly different way Los Angeles, create a strange and, at times, disconcerting sensation for a pedestrian of European sensibilities. Characterised by a lack of people, spaces that are too expansive and empty, exaggerated distances between sites, and a relative absence of the public spaces that characterise the “old continent”, which are illogical from a peripatetic perspective. To the car driver, however, they make perfect sense.

  By the time Zabriskie Point was released, such questions had become totally engrained in the architectural psyche of the American urban designer. Indeed, as early as 1963, Kevin Lynch, along with Donald Appleyard and John Myer, had published an entire book dedicated to the question of the “vehicular landscape”. In The View from the Road, these authors analysed a whole series of factors regarding our visual perception of both the rural and urban landscape whilst in motion, that is, whilst driving. Their stated aim was to “develop design strategies for urban planners that would help create interesting and understandable driving experiences”.14 The attention of the driver, they suggest, is fragmentary. It jumps between multiple stimuli that occur at random intervals and at varying speeds: the blinking of traffic lights, the passing of cars and the numerous actions of pedestrians on the sidewalk, being just some of the most obvious points of reference. Attention, they argue, becomes focused at “points of decision”. It switches from the interior to the exterior, jumps from the fore to the background, centres itself on things seen straight ahead, and is always attentive of what lies behind. In addition, sound plays a part in the highly complex, fluctuating and multiple perceptual experience of driving, with beeping horns, pedestrian shouts and general street noise all becoming part of the perceptual menagerie of the driver.15

  In trying to find a form of architectural representation capable of capturing this, Lynch, Appleyard and Myer proposed a number of strategies, one of which was the use of film. The type of filming they suggested, however, was “continuous shooting with a static camera” placed inside, or strapped to, a car. The visual effect this creates is one that captures some of the characteristics they identify, but loses any sense of the dynamism they ascribe to the act of driving; the direction of view is static and constant and does not shift its focus in
response to what happens around it. In conjunction with static filming, they also developed an abstract graphic language that was highly complex. Involving notational techniques that indicated things like “sense of speed”, “change of viewing direction”, “zones of acceleration and deceleration”, this “graphic language” was only decipherable by the initiated, and completely failed to capture the sense of dynamism that they themselves had described. They had, however, identified an issue that was to re-emerge in the work of Venturi et al. the need to develop new modes of architectural visualisation to represent this new way of perceiving architecture and the urban landscape.

  Figure 3: Venturi’s view from the interior of a car.

  Figure 4: Antonioni’s filming from inside the car.

  In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi et al. questioned the modes of representation used by architects when engaging with cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Plans, sections and elevations, they argued, were not only incapable of representing the nature of experiencing “cities in motion”, but actually distorted that experience by turning it into a series of static and isolated images. In response to the inability of these representational techniques to capture our perceptual experience, they proposed the use of a technique still popular in the dying days of pop art: the collage. As a design tool, and means of visual communication, the collage clearly breaks with the formality of the elevation, fragments the rationality of the plan and deconstructs the logic of the section. It is clearly far more representative of the “live, chaotic experience” of the car driver as described by Lynch, Appleyard and Myer. However, it still lacks two important features of this perceptual phenomenon: movement and change.