Architecture Filmmaking

PART ONE

Architecture Filmmaking Technique

Part One: An Introduction

In their analyses of usually classic, avant-garde commercial and art house films, architectural theoreticians, historians and educators have typically speculated on the ways in which film studies and film theory technique informs an understanding of architecture and space. In this part of the book, filmmaking technique, instead, is discussed with architecture investigated through a filmmaker’s or cinematographer’s eyes and practice. Here, some techniques of non-architect filmmaking are set out to expand the architect’s understanding of audio-visual culture, including narrative, cinematography, editing, lighting, sound and visual effects in order to inform their production and knowledge of architecture and the city. Variation in image proportion, shot type and duration are a few of the techniques used by professional filmmakers from which architects can learn. In ‘Architecture Filmmaking Technique’, approaches and methods used in filmmaking are foregrounded.

In her essay, Sarah Breen Lovett notes how the artist Dan Graham and the architects Dillier and Scofidio play with the codes and expectations of film to defamiliarize domestic settings, allowing them to be seen anew. Likewise, Alexandra Stara argues that it is only through technique – through the deliberate and studied manipulation of the medium – that meaning can emerge. Film brings the latent properties of place and location to view, as evidenced in the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg. Fred Truniger examines how a specific technique – in this case, the pan – can actually produce new knowledge, by virtue of the mode of view that it opens up. In films such as Johan Lurf’s Reconnaisance, panning can be seen to deliberately manipulate the perception of time and space to powerful effect. For Douglas Smith, a technological advance, such as the advent of widescreen in the 1950s, can prompt a range of new methods that, in turn, give rise to new possibilities for storytelling and for communicating ideas about space and location. Using the distinction between pro-filmic and diegetic space – between the setting and the story – Smith explores how the two can be set in dialogue with each other, as in Melville’s Le Samouraï. In a related vein, Troiani and Campbell discuss the ways in which the extended tracking shot can be used to establish the extent and nature of a particular spatial realm - whether an urban scene, as in the Mexican border town of Touch of Evil, or interiors, such as the Hermitage in Russian Ark. Finally in this section, Christine McCarthy considers how the relationship between the space of the screen and the space of the viewer is currently being configured. Using a Samsung advertisement for new curved screen technology, McCarthy explores how – since the Lumiere Brothers set a train in motion towards a roomful of viewers – filmic space always threatened to trespass on lived space while remaining ultimately separate. In each instance, film technology and its attendant techniques and methods are understood as the means by which specific meanings and effects are achieved. The implication might be that, in using the medium, the question of what is filmed might ultimately be less urgent than the question of how it is filmed.

Architectural Codes in the Works of Dan Graham, Bernard Tschumi and Diller and Scofidio

Sarah Breen Lovett

Introduction

This chapter will examine works by artist Dan Graham and architects Bernard Tschumi, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio that engage with aspects of moving image to examine, critique and deconstruct architectural codes. The term ‘architectural code’ developed for this chapter is used to refer to habituated haptic relationships with architecture. As theorist Walter Benjamin (1936) points out, our architectural relationships are learned through experience and repetition, but become overlooked because they are repeated so often. Our relationships with architecture can also be thought through psychologist James Gibson’s (2014: 57) notion of ‘affordance’, that says the implied purpose of objects influences the way we perceive the limits of our bodies. Therefore, architectural codes are understood to be the way we habitually perceive architecture to permit physical interactions with our body and the subsequent haptic experiences and perceptions of the body in relation to those interactions. In line with this definition of architectural codes, it can be observed that Graham’s Picture Window Piece (1974) and Diller and Scofidio’s Slow House (1991) propose scenarios where live-feed video is used to reflect and critique architectural codes. In contrast, cinematic terms and techniques are used as a catalyst for form-making that aims to deconstruct the presence of architectural codes in Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (1976–1981) and subsequent architectural design of Parc de la Villette (1982–1998).

This chapter will argue that while these engagements with live-feed video and architectural drawing/design theoretically highlight and deconstruct the notion of architectural codes, they are similarly neutral in approach, i.e. the live-feed videos aim to reflect what is already there through truthful or un-authored reflection of an encounter, while the architectural drawings and design set the stage for potential alternative relationships to architecture to evolve. In an attempt to shift discussion away from these often-quoted examples, this chapter will examine works by these artists and architects that utilize active, authored techniques such as pre-recorded moving image, installation and narrative to disrupt architectural codes. We will look at examples where, while in the act of filming, the body of a filmmaker is in an unusual or atypical relationship with architecture. This means the filming creates a non-habitual, haptically shifted relationship to the architecture. Further, we will examine examples where unusual architectural installations and alternative narrative constructs can also generate discussions of shifted habitual and haptic relationships with architecture. These examples will illustrate that it is not the idea of neutral moving-image constructs that examines, subverts or deconstructs architectural code; rather, it is the intent of re-imagining relationships with architecture that activates all the works.

Live-Feed Video and Film Works by Dan Graham

Graham’s Picture Window Piece, 1974 (Figure 1) is a proposal for two live-feed video monitors, adjacent to a suburban home’s living-room picture window. When outside, the person on the street simultaneously sees inside the interior through the window and a monitor image of themselves looking in the window. Meanwhile the person on the interior sees the exterior view of the street through the window and a monitor image of themselves looking out of the window (Graham 1979a: 36). The work proposes to examine the window as a signifier of public versus private and interior versus exterior (Graham 1979a: 35). This is illustrated through Graham’s statement: ‘From behind glass, the spectator’s view is objective, while the observer’s subjectivity is concealed; the observer on the outside of the glass cannot be part of an interior group’s inter-subjective framework’ (Graham 1979b: 70). The unconscious nature of this type of habituated engagement with architectural (or spatial) codes has been discussed by Birgit Pelzer and Benjamin Buchloh (Pelzer 2011: 41; Buchloh 2011: 9), while the malleable nature of relationships such as these has been discussed by Robert Smithson and Marie-Paule Macdonald (Smithson 1968; Macdonald 1995: 30). These writers propose that architectural relationships are created and able to be influenced simultaneously by society and the individual.

Whether defined by society, the individual or both, ultimately Picture Window Piece highlights the perception of a relationship between the self and the window through the act of creating a mirror effect. That is, an awareness of seeing oneself see. As Graham (1979a: 35) states ‘being mirror reflective, glass reflects the mirror-image of an observer, as well as the particular inside or outside world behind him into the image of the space which he is looking’. Numerous historians have explored this aspect of Graham’s work; Marc Perelman (1995: 71) draws a direct link from our perception of architecture’s physicality to the perception of ourselves within this construct and Pelzer (2011: 52) explores its link specifically to Graham’s reference to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage. While, later Beatriz Colomina (2011: 164) outlines how the mirror effect operates on a number of different scales from perception of self within society to the domestic environment that one is within.

In Picture Window Piece, Graham relies on the proposal of live-feed video as the most direct method of working with architecture. Graham primarily uses live-feed video because he sees it as a neutral, un-authored medium. Graham (1979b: 62) explains: ‘Video is a present time medium. Its image can be simultaneous with its perception by/of its audience (it can be the image of its audience perceiving). The space time it presents is continuous, unbroken and congruent to that of the real time […] video […] connects parallel time/space continua’. This lies in contrast to his description of pre-recorded footage as:

discontinuous, its language constructed […] from syntactical and temporal disjunctions [...] a reflection of a reality external to the spectator’s body; the spectator’s body is out of the frame […] contemplative and ‘distanced’; it detaches the viewer from present reality and makes him a spectator.

(Graham 1999: 84)

Figure 1: Dan Graham, Picture Window Piece, 1974. Reprinted courtesy of the artist and The MIT Press from Double Exposure – Alteration to a Suburban House by Beatriz Colomina in October Files 11, MIT Press 2011.

Figure 2: Dan Graham, Roll, 1970. Reprinted courtesy of the artist and The MIT Press from Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, by Dan Graham and Alexander Alberro.

Further, Graham (quoted in Hatton 1981: 321) elaborates on his uncertainty with the pre-recorded image: ‘it is difficult to separate the optics of the materials of the architecture, from the psychological identifications constructed by the film images’. Graham implies through these three quotes that live-feed video is able to render the real more real, whereas the pre-recorded image separates the viewer from reality.

However, rather than see Graham’s proposal of live-feed video as a way of mirroring and amplifying the existing architectural condition, one could argue that any act of intervention or mirroring of an existing architectural condition alters that condition to a greater or lesser extent. This argument builds upon Graham’s (2001: 179) criticism of works that do not aim to ‘alter, decompose, disquiet or affect the surrounding environment’ and Marie-Paule Macdonald’s (1995: 44) discussion of the effect of ‘making strange’ previously un-noticed codes of architecture. Therefore it can be argued that attempting to look at the existing condition through the live-feed video construction will inevitably change the existing architectural code, and hence the relationship to architecture can no longer be critiqued in terms of its original state that it proposes to examine.

Further, it can be argued that the critique of architectural codes could also be examined if the processes of filming and editing were layered and explored in relation/reaction to perceived architectural codes. The decisions that could be made in relation to architecture through these acts may enable more in-depth analysis of the corporeal implications of architectural codes than the purported neutrality of the live-feed video. Further, the haptic reactions of the filmmaker and spectator in relation to the architectural imagery, as defined by architectural codes, would be no less real than the ideas of architectural code that come from thinking about Graham’s proposed live-video feed installation .

To support this suggestion, we can consider Graham’s film Roll, 1970 (Figure 2). This is a moving-image work made by two recording cameras, one on the ground pointing at Graham who is rolling around on the floor while holding another camera that records his movements from his visual perspective. The first camera sees the body in an unusual relationship with the architecture of the floor, wall and ceiling, while the second camera sees the floor, walls and ceilings from a shifted point of view that highlights the habitual haptic vertical stance and viewing position of Graham and hence the spectator. This work can be considered an example where the filmmaker, during the act of filming, subverts the habituated relationships to architecture. This, in turn, simultaneously reveals corporeal implications of accepted architectural codes, while creating a heightened haptic viewing experience because of the shifted relationship of the filmmaker to the architecture.

Live-Feed Video and Installation by Diller and Scofidio

Along similar lines to Graham’s Picture Window Piece, Diller and Scofidio’s project Slow House, 1991 (Figure 3) is another method of critical analysis of architectural codes that engages with live-feed video. This project is a hypothetical proposal for a holiday home, where the whole construct of driving to it, walking into the house and looking at the view is presented. The main focus is the view out of a window, next to which a live-feed video is placed showing images of the external view more clearly and completely than the view through the real window is able to show. While Aaron Betsky and Jessica Barkley-Blaustein explore specific notions of domesticity in Slow House (Betsky 2003: 32; Barkley-Blaustein 2001: 19), the broad ambition of this work is summarized by the way Diller and Scofidio call the work ‘reflexive’. That is you are meant to see yourself seeing (Diller and Scofidio 1994: 223). The reflexive nature of Slow House is discussed in terms of revealing the real by a number of historians (Bremner 2000: 109; La Marche 2001: 2212; Hayes 2003: 129; Hansen 2006: 214). All of these historians outline how the construction of the real view alongside the mediated image creates a situation where the viewer is awakened to the act of seeing oneself see.

Building upon these examinations of the domestic and reflexive, Edward Dimendberg (2003: 67) explains how the architectural codes are part of the everyday and Georges Teysott contends architectural constructs are something that are deeply engrained. This is a point illustrated by Teysott’s statement that Diller and Scofidio are ‘cutting and carving into the very flesh of architecture, revealing the many incarnations and incorporations that have constituted its matter and spirit over the centuries’ (Teysott 1994: 8). This view of architectural codes being deeply culturally ingrained is reminiscent of the way that Rosalind Krauss discusses other ‘architecture’ and ‘not architecture’ installation works by Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Christo as ‘mapping the axiomatic features of architectural experience […] onto the reality of a given space’ (1979: 41).

In their film-art-architecture installation practice, Diller and Scofidio (1994: 39) do not wish to just draw attention to our relationships to architecture, they aim to subvert them as a form of critical architecture. Jean La Marche (2001: 2212) says the subversion takes place because the picture window does not have as complete a view as the live-feed video does; the real view is therefore rendered incomplete, while the complete view through the video feed is not considered real. According to Teysott (1994: 15) only when there is a subversion of habit can a ‘malfunction’ occur and that the habit is highlighted because if it were not subverted it would remain unnoticed. Therefore, as argued earlier in this chapter about Graham’s work, it can be stated that Slow House subverts the habituated relationship to architecture, because it cannot be experienced and reflected upon in its proposed initial state before the subversion. That is, in works of this kind it is difficult to discern and examine the habituated experience of architectural codes from the subversion of that experience.

While a number of historians have discussed the significance of the medium of live-feed video as a technology to explore the architectural condition in this work (Foster 2011: 96; La Marche 2001: 2205; Schaffer 2003: 98), it may be suggested that the live-feed video is perhaps too authorless or neutral to actively examine habituated and haptic implications of architectural code. Let’s imagine, for a moment, occupying the Diller and Scofidio installation Withdrawing Room (1987) (Figure 4). We may consider how we would navigate the splits and shifts in the floor, walls and furniture; re-consider the usable nature of the furniture and fittings because of their elevated heights and comprehend the shifting perspectival views. The altered architectural assemblages in Withdrawing Room are layered with the many potential movements of our bodies and in turn the relationship of ourselves to the space shifts. Just as Slow House is not a moving-image work, neither is Withdrawing Room. While both works foreground the habituated use of space and its haptic experience, architectural codes are challenged more directly in the installation of Withdrawing Room.

Figure 3: Diller & Scofidio, Slow House, 1991. Photo by Diller and Scofidio, Courtesy of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro.

Figure 4: Diller & Scofidio, Withdrawing Room, 1987. Photo by Diller and Scofidio, Courtesy of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro.

Film Works by Bernard Tschumi

In contrast to the practices of Graham and Diller and Scofidio outlined above, Tschumi (1987: 7) aims to avoid all understandings of architectural codes. This is most thoroughly explored in the writing of Jacques Derrida (1985: 7) who says Tschumi deconstructs the notion of meaning or semantics in architecture in order to unsettle any assumptions about architectural experience. Derrida’s interpretation is reflective of Tschumi’s own view:

The most fundamental concept of architecture has been constructed. This naturalized architecture is bequeathed to us; we inhabit it, it inhabits us, we think that it is destined for habitation, and it is no longer an object for us at all […] but we must recognize that it is an artifact, a construction and a monument. It did not fall from the sky, it is not natural.

(1985: 7)

For Derrida, architecture has been constructed and is not predetermined. To reconstruct, or rather deconstruct, understandings of architecture Tschumi uses the language of cinematic technique as a diagramming tool in The Manhattan Transcripts, 1976–1981. This work consists of a series of drawings that use the terminology of film editing devices to re-consider a mapping of the city of Manhattan. Tschumi used techniques such as ‘flashbacks, jump cuts, dissolves’ (1987: 12) and ‘superimposition, collision, distortion, fragmentation’ in order to deconstruct ideas of what constitutes architectural and urban experience (1998: 250). This diagrammatic and formalist approach is generated from references to the language and techniques in 1920s single-screen avant-garde films, specifically Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov (Tschumi 1985: 25).

These filmic diagrams were then translated into built form in a series of non-programmatic follies in Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1982–1998). Parc de la Villette is, as Sandra Kaji-O’Grady (2002: 1) describes, a serialist exploration of ‘regulated permutation and combination’. Jonathan Hill points out the potential of the cinematic as a design tool that creates something between ‘temporal montage’: a closed unalterable system that is in the past; and ‘spatial montage’: an open, alterable system, extending in all directions (Hill 2003: 110). Therefore Tschumi’s follies, in their lack of programme and adaptable nature, are suggesting that the ‘active user’ of architecture can alter and change the prescribed architectural conditions. However, as Hill (2003: 88) emphasizes, the potential for the user to really deconstruct the architectural code is contained within ‘a narrow and predictable range of configurations’. This means that the occupants of the Parc de la Villette can be active users of architecture: questioning, defying and dismissing existing architectural codes. In the follies of the park, the walls are (sometimes) used to separate interior from exterior, the horizontal surfaces are (sometimes) used for weather protection, walking on or eating off and the openings are (sometimes) used for looking out of, providing light and framing views.

Tschumi (1994: XXVII) considers the never-ending possibilities of the altered uses of architecture as an ‘alternative narrative’ that provides an ‘inventive catalogue’ for opening up architects to the ideas that architectural spaces can be used for deconstructing preconceived understandings for the use of space. He specifically refers to the use of ‘alternative narrative’ in generating subverted understandings of architecture, as a type of ‘madness’ that in disjunction and disassociation can lead to the ‘unexpected and the allegatory [sic], the pragmatic and the passionate […] formerly excluded from the realm of architecture because it seemed to belong to the realm of the irrational’ (Tschumi 1998: 176). These ideas have been explored most clearly in his writings on the ‘Violence of architecture’ (Tschumi 1998: 121) and ‘The pleasure of architecture ’ (Tschumi 1977: 48). These explore the violence and pleasure that comes from using architecture in a way that it was not intended. With these ideas, Tschumi (1994: 8) aims to ‘question functional requirements, and favours those activities generally considered negative and unproductive […] a different reading of spatial function […]. A definition of architecture (that) may lie at the intersection of logic and pain, rationality and anguish, concept and pleasure’. Tschumi (1998: 148) gives examples such as ‘Pole vaulting in the chapel, bicycling in the laundromat, skydiving in the elevator shaft’. In this way, Tschumi proposes to use alternative narrative as a tool to shift perception of the typical expected function of architecture.

The extent to which Tschumi’s cinematically generated diagrams and buildings engage with the potential of alternative narrative has been re-considered most notably by Tschumi’s former student and head of NATO (Narrative Architecture Today) at the Architectural Association, Nigel Coates. Coates (1983: 70) notes Tschumi’s approach as being too concerned with formal games, rather than a real, corporeal experience of architecture and writes: ‘It seemed that in the past too much time had been spent on other creative fields – writing, art or film. The time had come to experiment with the interface between architecture and everything that filled it up – with buildings and lifestyles it contained’. Under Coates, NATO were looking beyond the device of filmic language for their practice. They worked with layers of narrative, real-life performance, mixed media, space and event to build up a cacophony of experience that allowed a new type of architectural exploration.

To further consider Tschumi’s ambitions to engage with alternative narratives to deconstruct prescribed architectural conditions, rather than refer to the Manhattan Transcripts and the Parc de la Villette, we may consider another of his works. It can be argued that a single still image and poster from the Advertisements for Architecture, 1976–1977 (Figure 5) series, specifically the work called To Really Appreciate Architecture, You May Even Need to Commit a Murder, should be examined. While this work is not a moving image, it suggests movement and engages with a narrative. Within this work a woman, engaging in an act of defenestration, is pushing a man out of a window. The usual understanding of the window as an architectural element for letting light and air into a space, framing a view, delineating public from private, is challenged. The window and its position of height on the building has now become a murder weapon. In this image Tschumi challenges the window with an unforeseen event that de-familiarizes our expectations of what a window is used for. Tschumi (1998: 237) emphasizes the significance of familiar use: ‘In architecture, in particular the notion of de-familiarisation was a clear tool. If the design of windows only reflects the superficiality of the skins decoration, we might very well start to look for a way to do without windows’. In To Really Appreciate…, a body is shown to be mis-using the architectural construct of a window on an upper floor of a building, while the latent potential for the architecture to be used for an alternative use is also revealed. In this way, the architectural element is foregrounded in the action of the image. This suggests that the fictitious potential of narrative allows a specific examination of architectural codes, beyond the loosening of habitual form-follows-function understandings of architecture in Parc de la Villette.

Figure 5: Bernard Tschumi Advertisements for Architecture, 1976–1977. © Bernard Tschumi.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that works such as Picture Window Piece, Slow House and Manhattan Transcripts are not moving-image works per se, they are long-held (and valuable) examples of the intersection of ideas between moving image and architecture. The techniques used in these works have been utilized because they, in part, appear ‘authorless’; that is, the live-feed video claims to mirror the existing real architectural condition, while the serialist form-making claims to not be driven by any deterministic rationale. It has been illustrated that these techniques can be considered limited in their discussions of critiquing, subverting and deconstructing architecture codes in relation to haptic or habituated relationships to architecture. In response, this chapter has considered other works to discuss these ideas such as Roll, Withdrawing Room and To Really Appreciate….

In Roll the act of filming by Graham challenges habituated and haptic relationships to the floor. Rather than the habituated use of a floor to walk or sit on, it is used as a surface to support the body rolling around as an extension of the camera. Rather than the haptic relationship with the floor being something that is felt under the soles of the feet or buttocks/legs while sitting, it is felt with the whole body in a kinetic, sensory relationship. The filmmaker’s new relationship to the floor is represented through the moving camera, and therefore alters the way the audience experiences the floor through the filmic image. Therefore, the function of the floor, the use of the body in relation to it and the audience reception of it are all shifted through this work in an unexpected way. This, one could argue, is a far more active inquiry of shifting architectural code through moving image, than merely mirroring what we think our relationship to a floor is, through live-feed video.

In Diller and Scofidio’s Withdrawing Room the function and position of the floor, chairs and bed are altered, and therefore the habituated and haptic relationships to these are shifted. While, like their Slow House, this is not a moving-image work, it is not difficult to imagine oneself trying to sit on a split chair, navigate a split floor or sit at a table on the ceiling. It is in this ‘imagining’ that the habituated and haptic relationships to these elements of the space are shifted, arguably in a more active and authored way than imagining standing in front of a live-feed video looking at a view out of an adjacent window, as in the more oft discussed work in relation to the notion of architectural codes: Slow