The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  In including discussions on the use of film and video in workshop contexts, Urban Cinematics picks up on a theme that has been persistent in architectural education for decades. Indeed, François Penz discussed the issue almost twenty years ago in a paper titled Cinema and Architecture, in which he described “cinematic” projects carried out with architecture students at Cambridge University. In this essay, Penz identifies a basic skills base that architects share with directors, set designers and cinematographers; “an ability to draw, think of space in three dimensions, build models and, although only incipient at the time, the use of analogous animation and computer generation software”.8 In the cinematic-architectural design projects he laid out, students used drawings that were filmed and later animated, created physical models subsequently filmed with micro-cameras and recorded the use of spaces by filming from a camera fixed to the ceiling so as to better understand questions of architectural plan and ergonomics through the medium of film.

  Clearly going beyond mere analogy, such experimentations in the use of film in architectural practice were echoed in experimental architecture projects led by Lorcan O’Herily at the Architectural Association, London, at around the same time. Focusing on the analogy between the eye and the camera examined by Sergei Eisenstein in Montage and Architecture,9 O’Herily identifies film’s potential to reorganise the standard space-time concepts of architects. He then outlines a two-stage project in which students initially use the film or video camera to analyse and question the spectator-screen relationship of performance, and later apply their theoretical and practical findings to the design of an open air cinema for the Venice Biennale, 1994. The narrative mode of cinema, he argues, is paralleled with architectural/spatial narration of the architectural proposals.10

  In recent years, Aurora Herrera Gómez has run a series of experimental architecture-film events in the University San Pablo CEU (Madrid, Spain), in which architects, filmmakers, set designers and scriptwriters have collaborated with architecture students in projects that explore the applicability of film’s language, techniques, modes of representation and working methods in the realm of spatial design. Week-long events, titled El cine: un laboratorio de arquitecturas, involve a combination of lectures, filmmaking workshops and architectural design projects that again encourage architects to go beyond mere analogy and comparison in discussions of film and architecture and actually think about spatial design through the framework of cinema.11

  Concurrent to all of these projects, and many other similar workshops and activities across the globe, has been the investigation into the use of film in architectural education and practice by Pascal Schöning. Teaching a Film Unit at the Architectural Association between 1991 and 2008, Schöning consistently used film to question the notion of architecture’s permanence.12 Often using polemic and emotive “sites” for architectural projects, such as Sarajevo in 1997 and Hiroshima on the fiftieth anniversary of its bombing, he argued that in such places “buildings are not enough”.13 At times these projects involved the use of film as a documentary tool in the process of site analysis or understanding the “sense of a particular place”,14 at others however, film became a design tool and even, in some instances, the “building project” itself.

  One such example of this last phenomenon was the use of filmic projection on building facades in an attempt to “alter architectural reality through the application of light”.15 Used at the Europa Exhibition in Linz, Austria, in 1994, it was also used on a larger scale on the AA building itself in Bedford Square later that same year. This use of film as an “architectural material” was also central to Schöning’s installation works, which have also been used as a platform for the exhibition of student projects. “Cinematic House”, 2006, was a perfect example. Here, a film and light installation was created in the small AA gallery, which turned the space into what was called “a site of mood enhancing projections” that “dematerialised” the “solid” location.16 David Cunningham of the journal Radical Philosophy identified it as “indebted to Gilles Deleuze” and as representing “an ever changing process of illuminated and enlightening event-appearances”.17

  Schöning’s book, Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture, was published with the exhibition and display of students’ work, in which he proposes an approach to architecture that questions its “object status”. He also proposes the idea of “spatiality”, an ultimately indefinable concept involving “a process of continually adding and subtracting perceptions from the sensorial experience”.18 Cinematic architecture is, for Schöning, representative of the conflicts between the stable and the temporal which underline experience but which cannot be captured in architecture as built, solid form. Both the installation and the student projects it displayed then, represented a particular theoretical view of architecture that he and his students sought to primarily implement through the medium of film. Their work thus became a physical and mediated synthesis; a cinematic architecture that was inherently hybrid in nature but which operated in the physical realm.

  As with the work of Penz, O’Herily and Herrera, the educational practice of Schöning introduces film into the very fabric of the designer’s praxis with the aim of truly embedding a cinematic mindset in architectural research and design processes. This objective is clearly shared by the works of Diller and Scofidio and the smaller installation and performances pieces of Hyrbid Artworks. It is also shared in the conceptual and educational contexts by the theories and workshops that emerged from Hyrbid Artworks’ experiments in filmic-architectural perception, the aim of which is to identify the “visual language of cinema” and to subsequently find ways in which that “visual language” can inform and enrich the architectural design process.

  In the following pages, a more detailed explanation of these theories, and the workshops stemming from them, will be outlined in some detail. The intention is to offer a clear example and a methodology through which the cinematic-architectural relationship can be explored and developed. Whilst it is only one of a number of possible approaches, it is clearly aligned with the concerns that permeate all the essays of this book and is intended to offer a template that can operate in architectural praxis. The ideas and workshops described were developed in schools of film, design and architecture in both the United Kingdom and Spain, and have subsequently been implemented at universities in Mexico, South Africa and the United States. Their underlying precepts have emerged from the engagement in film, architecture and video that commenced in the early 1990s with the first films of Hybrid Artworks and continued throughout their installation works.

  Notes

  1Neumann, Dietrich (ed). “Introduction”. In: Dietrich Neumann (ed), Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Prestel, London, 1996. p. 7.

  2For a description of the “film architecture” of Expressionist film, see: Dieter Schaal, Hans. Spaces of the Psyche in German Expressionist Film. In: M. Toy (ed), Architectural Design: Architecture and Film II. Vol. 70, No. 1, 2000. p. 12–15. See also: Vilder, Anthony. “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary”. Assemblage, No. 21, MIT Press, 1993. p. 47–49.

  3The idea that film and architecture are related disciplines that share significant commonalities has been questioned by a number of architectural and filmic scholars. One such objection comes from Kester Rattenbury who argues that film’s lineal narrative time structure makes it an inappropriate analogy for architecture. He also argues that a large number of theorists working in this field rely on “analogies” between film and architecture that leave little scope for practical lessons to be applied in practice. See: Rattenbury, Kester. “Echo and Narcissus”. Architectural Design: Architecture and Film. Vol. 64, No. 1, 1994. p. 34.

  4For information on the ideas dealt with in this conference, see the resulting book publication: Hallam, Julia, Koeck, Richard, Kronenburg, Robert and Roberts, Les (eds). Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, 2008
.

  5See conference proceedings: Penz, François and Lu, Andong (eds). Urban Cinematics: Film, City and Narrative, University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge, 2009.

  6Patrick Sjöberg argues that the documentation of the city in film is generally understood through the format of the City Symphony genre. Given new modes of living, new technologies of representation and the new technologies through which we engage with the city, this is in need of updating. See: Sjöberg, Patrick. “I Am Here, on the Art of Getting Lost: Patrick Keiller and the New City Symphony”. In: François Penz and Andong Lu (eds), Urban Cinematics: Film, City and Narrative, Ibid. p. 8–15.

  7See the second publication to come from the Urban Cinematics: Film, City and Narrative Conference: Penz, François and Lu, Andong (eds). Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image, Intellect Books, Bristol, 2012.

  8Penz, François. “Cinema and Architecture”. Architectural Design: Architecture and Film. Ibid. p. 38–42.

  9In a 1938 text on the relationship between cinema and architecture in the context of movement sequences and the experience of the built environment through “spatial or cinematic paths”, Sergei Eisenstein developed an argument that architecture functions as a form of precedent for cinema, both mediums being inherently sequential spatio-temporal sequences. He references the architectural historian Auguste Choisy’s descriptions of the Parthenon in this regard. See: Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage and Architecture”. Assemblage, December 1989. p. 111–131.

  10O’Herily, Lorcan. “Architecture and Film”. Architectural Design: Architecture and Film. Ibid. p. 90–93.

  11Aurora Herrera Gómez is an architect and exhibition curator. Her courses in cinema and architecture have been running since 2010 at the Escuela Politécnica Superior de la Universidad CEU San Pablo, Madrid. They are coordinated by Grupo AC.

  12Helsing Almass, Ingerid. “Is It Reality There?” In: P. Schöning, J. Löffler and R. Azevedo (eds), Cinematic Architecture, AA Publications, London. 2004 p. 20.

  13Helsing Almass, Ingerid. “Is It Reality There?” Ibid. p. 20.

  14Taek Park, Jean. “Space of Intensities: Intensification of Experience in Waves”. In: P. Schöning, J. Löffler and R. Azevedo (eds), Cinematic Architecture, Ibid. p. 144.

  15Helsing Almass, Ingerid. “Is It Reality There?” Ibid. p. 22.

  16Bailieu, Amanda (ed). “What Is Cinematic Architecture”. RIBA Journal. January 2006. p. 7

  17Cunningham, David. “Film Theory Fails to Project”. Building Design. Issue 1707, February 2006. p. 21.

  18Schöning, Pascal. Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture, AA Publications, London, 2006. p. 19.

  Cinematographic space: A study of Citizen Kane

  As a starting point in our attempts to understand the “visual language of cinema” and introduce it into architectural praxis, a distinction between two related concepts is proposed: physical space and cinematographic space. “Physical Space” is defined as the physical environment, real places or sets constructed in studios. By way of contrast, “Cinematographic Space” is definable as the spatial perception of those places or sets created and presented on screen by the director. Potentially malleable through the use of the cinematic medium, this filmic spatial perception can differ widely from the reality of the physical location. Thus, what we have are two terms that represent a distinction between “what is filmed” and “the way it is filmed”: real space and its mediated perception.1

  Accepting a certain level of generalisation, and an inevitable grey area between these two concepts, this distinction assumes that the “cinematographic construction” carried out by the director begins from the datum of the physical set, but that its final perceptual effect is “constructed” through the use of purely cinematic devices.2 Placing to one side questions of digital technology, amongst the more mundane examples of this is the strategic placing of a light source or the deliberate positioning of a symbolic prop so that it appears on screen at a given moment. Alternatively, it may involve the arrangement of furniture so that, when filmed from a particular point of view, it produces the desired compositional effect and even controls the movement of the actors. More fundamentally, techniques of cinematographic construction include the movement and positioning of the camera, the use of certain types of lenses, the duration of takes and the style of editing employed in post-production, etc.3

  Applying this type of basic analysis to the “spatial vision” of the director-cinematographer, a three-part division of constituent factors emerges: (i) the design, selection and specific organisation of the illumination and the set, defined here as “aesthetic factors”; (ii) the compositional arrangement of props and the corresponding effects this has on actor movements, referred to as “compositional and choreographic factors”; and (iii) the movements of the camera during the filming process and the subsequent interweaving of images in the editing process, defined here as the “filming style”. The differentiation of these three categories is made in order to permit a manageable and useful classification of the different factors involved in the visual treatment of spaces presented on film. There are, however, inevitable links between each and they can be employed in any number of possible configurations. Seen in the work of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu and Jean Renoir, the variety of “cinematographic spaces” that result from the variations is consequently enormous.

  In the case of Renoir, his “spatial style” can be said to revolve around the use of the long take and the moving camera, techniques that he employs in order to create a general sense of spatial fluidity and unity, and that go hand-in-hand with “deep space” compositions.4 In turn, these compositions allow multiple actions to be presented simultaneously, often in different depth planes, resulting in his propensity to employ uniform lighting arrangements that maintain all actions easily visible, no matter how far they are from the camera.5 The space thus constructed is not only ideal for the realisation of the complex choreographies of actors and camera for which Renoir is so well known, but also permits his elimination of the cut – both key characteristics of his work. In other words, the fluid and unified impression Renoir creates on screen is the result of his particular combination of the constitutive factors that make up any “cinematographic space”.

  By way of contrast, Yasujiro Ozu employs the same constitutive factors in different ways and configurations in order to present a much more static and fragmented image of space. Ozu bases his spatial construction on the use of the fixed camera positioned at floor level.6 Given the lack of movement of the camera, the actions of the protagonists also tend to restrict themselves to limited spaces. As a result, individual shots in an Ozu film acquire a noticeably static feel. This is emphasised by the use of architectural elements as subframes which, in turn, elicit a clear pictorial quality from individual shots. When he unites these isolated and static images in sequences of modular cuts however, he turns his static spatial construction into something more rhythmic and syncopated. He thus creates a “cinematographic space” that can be both still and fragmented.

  What this brief comment on Renoir and Ozu seeks to insinuate is that “cinematographic space” is not only the result of three constitutive factors – aesthetic, compositional-choreographic and filmic – but also the deliberate and particular combination of these factors. Given that different directors tend to employ their own particular configurations and thus develop their own “styles and spatial concepts”, a thorough investigation of “cinematographic space” requires the study of a wide range of directors and films. One director who was more polychromatic than normal in this regard however, and thus of greater interest as an object of study here, is Orson Welles. With the aim of experimenting with different spatial constructions, often within the same film, Welles the director combined and recombined these factors in multifarious and often contradictory ways.7 This was certainly the case with his masterpiece, Citizen Kane; a film that is not characterised by a definable spatial concept but rather
by a complete lack of one. The resulting “spatial multiplicity” makes it interesting from the point of view of “cinematographic space” and, as a result, four iconic scenes will be analysed in the following pages from a simple but technical cinematographic perspective.

  Citizen Kane. Scene 1. Set in the living room of Xanadu, the protagonist’s mansion home, this scene presents a cold and bitter conversation of few words between Charles Foster Kane and his second wife, Susan.8 In terms of its spatial presentation, it is simple and balanced. Using the spatial norms of the Hollywood continuity system, Welles ensures the clear and concise exposition of the space and the relative positions of those in it. By restricting the filming of the scene to the continuity system, the movements of both the camera and the actors are also restricted in line with the 180 degree rule.9 Here, Susan occupies the left-hand side of the screen and Kane the right, positions they maintain throughout the subsequent shot–counter shot sequence.

  As per the norm of the Hollywood system, the camera oscillates between two opposing points of view in the sequence and follows the oscillating dialogue of the actors so as to produce a clear, coherent and balanced perception of the space throughout (Figs. 1, 2). Having established this conventional basis for his filming of the scene however, Welles proceeds to manipulate the spatial treatment of the set through his use and misuse of the techniques we are calling here, “aesthetic factors”. In an attempt to convert the architectural setting into one of the principal actors of the scene, the set constructed is enormous. It has very little furniture and has features more readily associated with cathedrals than the intimacy of the home, its gothic windows being the most obvious example. Clearly too big and institutional for a couple, these features underline the utterly impersonal relationship between the protagonists.10