Film and Architecture

Films use architecture as visual shorthand to show viewers
what they need to know about characters in a short amount of
time. Using a phenomenological approach to look at a diverse
range of international, historical and contemporary films,
this book describes how we as viewers can read architecture
and design on the big screen to see a number of underlying
messages. Architecture’s representational capacity contributes
to the plausibility or realities that are possible in film. The book
provides an ontological understanding that clarifies and
stabilises the reciprocity between our actual and filmic worlds
of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on
both cinema and architecture.

The Invisible Machines exhibition, which took place in Brighton at Grand Parade, 8th December 2010 to 7th January 2011, explored the complex relationships between architecture and machines. This is the digital edition of post-exhibition catalogue. Limited edition physical editions were assembled and vacuum packed at RARA (the Redundant Architects Research Association) in London on the 6th June 2011. Contributions from Mike Aling, Ersi Ioannidou, Tom Foulsham, Glenn Longden-Thurgood, Tim Norman, Charlotte Raleigh, Ben Sweeting and Michael Wihart. Edited by Ben Sweeting.

Las relaciones entre el cine y la arquitectura comenzaron a manifestarse casi en los inicios de las proyecciones cinematográficas. En la mayoría de las películas se pueden ver espacios arquitectónicos, por lo que prácticamente cualquiera serviría para estudiar estas relaciones. Sin embargo, para especificarlas se han elegido seis temas fundamentales: la profesión arquitectónica; las obras de construcción; cineastas mostrando edificios existentes en la realidad; edificaciones creadas solo para aparecer en películas y su influencia en el mundo real; otras arquitecturas que solo pueden verse en filmes porque no tendría sentido construirlas en la realidad; y, por último, cómo la imagen en movimiento muestra la arquitectura de un modo específico. Las 50 películas seleccionadas son primordiales para poder estudiar, entender y llegar a conocer cómo han sido las relaciones entre la arquitectura y el cine desde sus inicios.

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

The Iranian artist's long-lasting attempt has been towards idealism.An Iranian painter has always been inclined to portray the world as it should, not to portray her own image of the world.In such a way that the universe reflected in the form of the transformed artist's will and reflected in the light of the harmonious laws.The reality is that the major schools of painting was based on Persian literature and developed elsewhere in the region.Specific and poetic visualization, iconography is an achievement of the Islamic art of Iran. The Iranians entered some kind of beauty into imagination into the architectural space and created decorative shapes which affected the nature of architecture.It aims to create a fantastic space and a floating world of imagination and embodiment of unity by applying all the ideals and elements of painting in space.This research deals with qualitative study of the art of painting and interpretation features.a framework based on three cognitive, beautiful and historical aspects, has been designed to analyze the methods of understanding the art of painting and architectureand identifies the weakness and strength of each of them and finally, a way to understand the architectural space in the Iranian paintings based on four pillars are cleared which include 1-Scrolling 2-scan the history of typology and cognitive symbols 3-Phenomenological and symbolic scans 4-Intuitive reflection (Veridical). Meanings may either endorse one another or abandon one another.From the results of this research, it is possible to present a new and well-known aesthetic solution in painting and architecture.

The article reads Pablo Trapero's film _Elefante Blanco_ (2012) in tandem with Ernesto Laclau's _On Populist Reason_ (2005). I argue, in line with Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancière, that the film portrays the uncountable/uncounted population of the slum at the centre of the film (Ciudad oculta) as a final term, a hard nucleus of the "real", that blocks the equivalential and repeating chain of empty signifiers that for Laclau constitutes the (Lacanian) logic of populist reason. The abandoned hospital, the "Elefante Blanco", comes to symbolize that which remains, and that which exceeds all the political processes that have attempted to address the "problem" of the villas.

This is a PDF of a book chapter published as: Kantaris, Geoffrey. “Pablo Trapero y el elefante blanco de la razón populista”. In Bernhard Chappuzeau and Christian von Tschilschke, eds, Cine argentine contemporáneo: visiones y discursos (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 2016), 83-106.

In this essay I will focus on film and power and implications of the use of spaces and architecture in its production. I will do so by using Wong Kar-Wai’s films because of his focus on the urban domain and how the Self becomes reinserted into the world. Typically, in director Wong Kar-Wai’s films stories are not only about where the characters are but also about “how an urban setting shapes characters and make them who they are”.  I will also focus on slow architecture, Wong's strategy of slowing down film speed to transform space and consider Guy Debord’s notion of the derive, developed in the 1960s as Wong’s memories of Hong Kong are, to explore a shared dreaming of space in a historic and contemporary context. Wong's films, In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express are discussed with an emphasis on Wong's repeated use of romantic love and the decision of his characters not to love, as a key narrative in his films.

For their seminal work Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Martino Stierli examines their cinematic methodology against the background of contemporary photography and pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, while highlighting Los Angeles as a cultural, urban, and architectural hot spot of the period. He considers how this approach relates to sociological theories and the phenomenology of urban spaces. He also sheds light on the polemics and controversies triggered by Learning from Las Vegas in architectural discourse and discusses them against models of high and low culture. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant for current debates in architecture and the arts.

Recent advancements in digital technology, have not only deeply transformed the production of film and architecture but brought the two disciplines closer than ever before. The digital has allowed ground-breaking, if not hasty, changes in the way that architecture is not only produced, but also designed and conceived. In contrast, however, to the extensive use of computational design to interrogate the formal, material and structural possibilities of architecture, this article explores how new time-based media and computer generated imagery in film can unlock the story-telling, political and philosophical potential of architecture. I will focus on three projects – Agit-Prop (2014) by Liam Davis, Wates House (2014) by Daniel Cotton and my project Déjà vu (2009) – which combine techniques and tropes from both cinema and design as a means for reflection and commentary in architecture.

Originally coined by the German artist Hans Richter in the 1940s, the term ‘essay film’ describes an intimate, allusive and idiosyncratic genre at the margins between fiction and documentary. Richter poignantly suggests that the essay film makes the invisible world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen; it produces complex thought-reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastical. Dealing with political and philosophical issues, the essay film is cinema at its most engaged and liberated.

Examining the three projects in comparison to examples of essay films that reflect on architecture or the city, such as Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Wim Wender’s, If Buildings Could Talk (2010), and Alain Resnais’s, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), my aim is to propose a new hybrid genre lying at the boundaries between architectural design, theory and film, what I call: the ‘architectural essay film’.

The reality is being questioned, even going so far as to doubt its existence; real space is also questioned, but the human being experiences the natural and artificial spaces; and amongst the latter the architectural, within which includes the performance one, related to the show. This performance space has been transformed according to the shows that have been happening in history and will continue modifying. Nowadays, it coincides with environments not previously employed for the show, because it can occur anywhere.
The scenographic space, which belongs to the performance, is projected and built with the rules of the scenography. It has been completed in different ways depending on the type of show and is related to the architectural space thanks to movement, because both be travelled through, physically or through the mediation of the creators of the shows; implying a classification of the scenographic space, according to this move-ment.
A typology which refers to each kinetic scenographic space based on classifications established by categories is essential to analyze deeply and lay the foundations to study this space.
Instruments are necessary in order to project and build the scenographic space. Some coincide with the architectural ones, but are generally different and specific according to different performances.  The instruments are described and catalogued to be able to know how to use them and to devise those spaces.
Architectural and performance spaces are created by the project and have different characteristics according to each discipline.  The main objective of the scenographic space project is to serve fiction and generally modify and improve the performance, which also happens today with the architectural space.
The construction of architectural space nowadays employs techniques and materials with which the scenographic space is also constructed. The kinetic scenographic space can also be built with its own techniques that are defined and classified, including new compositions of digital images. Two types of spaces emerge depending on where they are built and the role played by this construction in fiction, which are also discussed and defined.
The purpose of scenography and architecture is the creation of spaces that have com-mon characteristics. The scenographic space also has specific characteristics which don’t exist in the architectural one. Also the typologies, the instruments, the project and the construction differ between the two spaces.
Reality has become performance, the performance is projected and is built with the laws and rules of scenography, and then architecture must know these laws and rules, because they serve to construct reality.

Tokyo Story (1953) inscribes plenty of vignettes from everyday life of Japanese homes. Whereas various home visits, daily conversations, and household chores paint the surface of the film, the roiling emotions and transient relations, underneath this surface, give cue to how home environment is shaped from and out of the embodied relations with things. This research takes a phenomenological lens to look at the embodied relations that are mostly unconscious, contextual, and omnipresent. The paper, firstly, demonstrates the frame-shaping techniques of Tokyo Story entailing associations with the context of dwelling experience. It then investigates themes within the framed relations that imply temporariness and transience. The research hence signifies the atmospheric quality of home by articulating what dissociates from it. That includes dwindling relations with the dwelling, as well as capturing the absences and particular placements that haul out of the home environment. More generally, this research also aims to showcase the strength of film studies in examining how spaces are actually lived and what constitutes the atmosphere of home.

Film Parasite Bonga to jedna z częściej nagradzanych i najlepiej ocenianych przez recenzentów premier 2019 r. Większość dziennikarzy podkreślała w swych opiniach krytyczny i satyryczny wydźwięk utworu wymierzony przeciw rozwarstwieniu ekonomicznemu społeczeństwa Korei Południowej (i nie tylko). W proponowanej interpretacji jest jednak zaakcentowany zupełnie inny wymiar filmu, zasygnalizowany w tytułowej formule „architektura jako fabuła”. Artykuł składa się z trzech części. Część pierwsza obejmuje wstępne ustalenia teoretyczne związane z kategorią przestrzeni filmowej oraz relacją miasta (architektury) i filmu. Rozdział drugi to analiza semiotyki miasta oraz architektury domu, w którym rozgrywa się większa część akcji. Część trzecia jest poświęcona rozważaniom na temat architektury jako generatora kolejnych zdarzeń, które ostatecznie można interpretować jako rodzaj udawania na scenie bądź gry planszowej. W ramach konkluzji pojawia się propozycja, by ostatecznie potraktować film Bonga jako wypowiedź autotematyczną, której precyzyjna struktura jest nie tyle celem, ile tematem.

This abstract is the result of a keen interest in Architecture and Film, and more importantly a recently triggered regard for ‘The City and the Moving Images’. While focussing my research on the relationship between architecture and film i would like to delve into finding out how one is translated into the other, particularly, how narrative and concepts of moving images can be merged with architectural design. Studying Architecture and Film, two forces that have separately (in terms of time and space) shaped our lives and seeing how they can shape our lives in tandem is particularly exciting.
In my essay i intend to study methods of creating narratives for architecture as they are created for film, how these narratives can be perceived, and how they shape our lives. The power of Architecture and Film is such that both have become a narrative for our lives without us consciously knowing, this raises questions of our identity in space. Meanwhile i plan to research on the elements, processes, and the progression of moving images through an architectural lens with the hope of finding new insights into Architectural Design.
The space or framing of a space is as important as the objects or bodies that are part of it, I intend to bring this relationship into the topic and study how bodies move in space and how space moves around bodies. Such discourses in Architecture are initiated and related through the careful study of film-making processes, such as, in this case ‘Controlled Locomotion’. I also intend to draw links between the two Arts and us, how we perceive and feel about them, and how our thoughts of time and space are affected. I intend to research on the close-up, integration of objects, spatial and temporal experiences of sight (the unarmed eye) and sound, leading characters (particularly the non-human type), reality, aura, contemporary mass, and architectonic dramatisation.

This article explores the recent animated film installations and operatic stage direction of William Kentridge to conceptualise emerging trends in installation work, artists’ cinema and hybrid forms of the moving image. Kentridge opens new horizons for the articulation of the moving image with architectural space, reimagining the nature of film. Through a study of Kentridge’s installation, ‘I am not me, the horse is not mine’, his staging of the Shostakovich Opera, The Nose, and his installation work at documenta 13, the article explores how Kentridge mobilises the full potential of the material encounter with the filmic image in new forms of dynamic montage. Drawing on understandings of the tactile, sensory, kinaesthetic engagement with the image, the article examines how Kentridge incorporates the three-dimensional spatiality and materiality of an exhibition/architectural space into the filmic. Through this enquiry, the article considers the broader significance of Kentridge’s work for reconceptualising cinematic experience.

La obra cinematográfica de Luis Buñuel ofrece un sorprendente dispositivo de deconstrucción del espacio fílmico. El cineasta aragonés parte de la creación de un nuevo espacio, en consonancia con las vanguardias artísticas contemporáneas, como medio visual para desenmascarar las contradicciones de la moral burguesa. Este punto de partida nos permitirá estudiar su propuesta de una arquitectura espacial propiamente cinematográfica, que alcanza su manifestación más plena en sus ultimas películas. A lo largo del artículo, analizaremos el modo en que el cineasta aragonés disecciona el espacio cinematográfico mediante los procedimientos del surrealismo, así como el retrato de una arquitectura popular en su obra documental y sus ecos neorrealistas; la significación del espacio burgués y su moral, y finalmente, su concepción de una 'antiarquitectura' religiosa. La conclusión nos conducirá́ a una definición de la arquitectura en el cine de Buñuel como un espacio mental, un habitáculo que no se define por sus limites sino por sus discontinuidades y ambigüedades.

This article proposes that the film Slumdog Millionaire depicts a key moment in the history of India — the transformation during the 1990s of Bombay into Mumbai. In the film, the life trajectories of Jamal Malik (its Muslim protagonist), his Hindu love Latika, and his older brother Salim play out against the metamorphosis of the city from conditions of modernity to postmodernity. Recent scholarship has suggested this transformation involves the erasure of Bombay's former cosmopolitanism. The article argues that Slumdog Millionaire constructs an urban narrative that spatializes and critiques this change, and that is built on two tropes. First is the erasure of Bombay's complex local histories to facilitate its reinvention as monocultural, neoliberal Mumbai. This is expressed through the use of settings where the city's former architectural palimpsest is being razed to create homogenized redevelopment areas. Second is the increasing exclusion of the poor from public space — a point the film makes through its selective use (and avoidance) of traditionally emblematic public spaces. Overall, the film narrates Bombay/Mumbai's recent urban history as a class war between what Rahul Mehrotra has called the " kinetic " and the " static " cities. The article also builds on Nezar AlSayyad's argument that cinematic representations frequently draw on urban discourses in narrative construction — and, conversely, that cinema may serve as a lens through which to examine the cultural foundations upon which these discourses are built. In this regard, Slumdog Millionaire refers to three urban/ architectural spaces invested with specific ideological meaning: Dharavi, an organic settlement of vernacular architectures used to represent old Bombay; Lake Castle, an apartment building used to depict Bombay's neoliberal transformation into Mumbai; and Victoria Terminus, the Gothic Revival train station which serves as a site of contestation between those who would preserve the city's multiple histories and those who would overwrite them.

Everybody knows that Vertigo is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic masterpieces. However, only a few scholars have discussed the hidden correspondences between that film and the Surrealist poetics. The following text moves away from the gender interpretations omnipresent in the film’s bibliography since Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Instead, it will explore its visual elements, especially those associated with the art direction and the cinematography as well, in order to achieve a clear correspondence with the Surrealist "pensée en images", and with the concepts of “shock” and “optical unconscious” enunciated by Walter Benjamin in his seminal work “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techonological Reproducibility”. The last section of this paper is dedicated to the analysis of locations and set design in the movie, whose combination of architectural milestones in San Francisco and banal locations are the visual realization of the Surrealist “marvelous in the everyday”.
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Nadie duda que Vértigo es una de las obras maestras en la producción de Alfred Hitchcock. Sin embargo, pocos autores se han detenido en analizar las correspondencias latentes entre dicha película y las poéticas surrealistas. El siguiente artículo se aleja de las interpretaciones de género omnipresentes en la bibliografía desde el artículo de Laura Mulvey “Placer visual y cine narrativo”, para indagar en los aspectos visuales del filme, especialmente en aquellos relacionados con la cinematografía y la dirección artística, a fin de establecer una clara correspondencia con el concepto de pensée en images postulado por el surrealismo visual y literario, así como en los conceptos de shock e inconsciente óptico formulados por Walter Benjamin en su obra fundacional “La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica”. Las localizaciones y el diseño de decorados conforman la última parte del siguiente análisis interpretativo, en el que se combinan la naturaleza de algunos de ellos como hitos urbanos y la banalidad de otros espacios para materializar lo “maravilloso cotidiano” surrealista.

By paraphrasing Oliver Sack’s famous book title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, I wish to strike a note of ambivalence for this reflection on my ongoing doctoral project. I will present and try to disentangle some of the issues that have affected the work, and hopefully contribute to the discussion on doctoral education in architecture, particularly practice-oriented programs.

Aunque la ciencia ficción suele asociarse al futuro por su carácter de anticipación, desde la década de 1960 varios cineastas han decidido incorporar imágenes del pasado. Con ellas, no solo han querido reforzar la verosimilitud de sus propuestas sino, principalmente, poner en tela de juicio el concepto lineal de la historia y del progreso potenciado desde la Ilustración. El objeto de este artículo será analizar el porqué de su aparición y, sobre todo, explicar el modo en que son representadas aquellas imágenes del pasado –incluso del pasado reciente– en la cien- cia ficción distópica propia de la cinematografía mainstream, especialmente desde finales de los años 70. Por ello, el campo de estudio abarca alguna de las producciones más emblemáticas de directores situados en la esfera capitalista anterior a la caída del muro de Berlín, dado que la liberación de esas imágenes reprimidas actúa, además, como un comentario acerca del sistema económico sobre el cual se sustentan.

En un momento en que los grandes desarrollos de las ciudades occidentales tienden a ser más "inversión" que "vivienda", el papel del arquitecto ha pasado de diseñador de espacios habitables a productor de activos financieros. En mi serie de vídeos The (Un)RealShit, critico los vídeos de marketing utilizados por los arquitectos utilizando la edición de vídeo como herramienta crítica para desvelar algunas de las nuevas formas en que se construye y difunde la ideología arquitectónica a través de la web. Aquí explico las ideas que subyacen a mi serie y presento tres películas sobre "edificios que se construyen solos", los gestos de Bjarke Ingels y lo que yo percibo como la retórica vacía de Daniel Libeskind. / At a time when major developments in Western cities tend to be more “investment” than “dwelling”, the role of the architect has evolved from designer of inhabitable space to producer of financial assets. In my video series The (Un)RealShit, I critique the marketing videos used by architects using video editing as a critical tool to unveil some of the new ways in which architectural ideology is being constructed and disseminated through the web. Here I explain the ideas behind my series and present three films featuring “self-building buildings”, Bjarke Ingels’ gestures and what I perceive to be the empty rhetoric of Daniel Libeskind.

Architecture is said to be a spatialized expression of the political status quo. But does it incorporate revolution, or acts of civil resistance? Lebbeus Woods’ Underground Berlin/Berlin Free Zone is a unique example of a “spatial design” pursued over various media – from preparatory sketches, drawings, through models, storyboards and written pieces that were to lead up to a full-fledged film project – which visualizes resistance to totalitarian politics through buildings, subterranean structures and constructed “choreographies”, like those in Bernard Tschumi’s diagrams.
Its film noir plot operates as a guided tour of Woods’ subterranean city, portraying Berlin’s “historical imaginary” through unbuilt projects – those of past Berliners and his own – that interpret post-war Berlin’s tremulous history, along with its entry into post-communist reality after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Underground Berlin is not so much an envisioning of city’s future, as it is a revisionist parable on the ruthlessness of urban renewal in the 1980s, Nazi era Neo-Classicism, and Weimar Expressionism’s Alpine architektur re-emergent in the deconstructivist stalagmites of a cavernous world below the surface; an environment made of floating platforms ruffled by telluric currents. Underground Berlin’s radical architecture stands in for city’s ruptured identity.
This paper sets out to analyse the narrative structure of Woods’ treatment for an unmade film against the background of subterranean fictions – a subgenre of utopian literature – and science-fiction cinema, especially Vincent Ward’s version of the Alien3 script, for which the architect served as a conceptual artist/consultant, bestowed with both the themes and spatial inventions from Underground Berlin. The project’s subsequent dissemination into mass media (12 Monkeys), book projects (OneFiveFour, Terra Nova), along with concepts like freespaces developed in new political contexts of urban conflict zones/disaster sites, acknowledged an evolutionary modus operandi at the base of Woods’ unbuildable speculations.