Small World: The architecture speaks in the cinematic language

We understand sets, objects, people by their relationship to each other and ourselves. We would touch, observe, breathe, smell, talk, etc to make things familiar to our brain, to know how we are connected to them: We call a place with an oven and a sink, a kitchen, “As we read a poem, we internalize it, and we become the poem” (Pallasma,2007).

The very close example of creating a space is in films when a director carefully tries to manage to keep the flow of the storyline straight and sensible by going through screenplays, characters, locations, acts, and so on. “We will call the description of a closed system like frames and the small world, a relatively closed system which includes everything present in the image - sets, characters, and props - framing” (Deleuze,2000). More on that, When you watch a film, you would see everything is fused together and If it is a good flick, you will be a part of it too. “If it is a great book, it has become part of my soul and my body”(Pallasma,2007). 

The filmic subsets for architects, using a cinematic language for creating space, not only be made out of conventional architectural material but also characters and props are now part of the ingredient of making spaces.

Cinema and Architecture 

Films have had a souvenir from nineteenth-century for modernism, a shop providing sets of intriguing and diverse tool and techniques amongst the theories which have been born with them. Of all the art, Architecture has had the most privileged, difficult, and sometimes vague relationship to films, since both share lots of the same variables and attributes and both are the “Role model for spatial experimentation”(Vidler,1993).

Despite the fact that I have been influenced by Avant-grad architectural works at the time from Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts and Parc La Villette to Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, I want to circumscribe this text to the fusion of objects appearing in the medium of framing in order to tell a specific story, hens, the way that architecture has an inevitable effect to create a space in time for circumstances. 

Before Cinema, Music had been the closest art form to architecture. “In its inherent abstractness, music has historically been regarded as the art form closest to architecture” (Pallasma,2000). Karlheinz Stockhausen a German musician who has the reputation of “one of the great visionaries of 20thcentury music” (Hewett, 2007) from critics, tried to create a musical space throughout a mixture of musical conventional and invented notations, or Iannis Xenakis with the impressive background on mathematics and music, together with Le Corbusier designed and built the ‘Philips Pavilion’ on 1958, a project which was based on musical mathematics for creating an immersive atmosphere in architecture. 

Cinema was invented and it has changed with history, technology and movements, moreover it has been getting bigger toe-to-toe with human imagination.”Cinema is, however, even closer to architecture than music, not solely because of its temporal and spatial structure, but fundamentally because both architecture and cinema articulate lived space”. (Pallasma,2000)

Film directors create pure poetic architecture, which arises directly from our shared mental pictures and common senses of dwelling and interaction. Directors such as Lars Von Trier and Federico Fellini have created a moving architecture of memory, longing, and melancholy, one that assures us so-called filmic architecture is also capable of addressing our expectations from quality and experience of space.

As an architect, my angle towards cinema is more like a director, A director creates a world for characters to fall in love, to grieve, to struggle with a crisis in their life or to enjoy the simplicity of life. However, all the experiences are beyond life itself cause directors know they have limited time to sketch a life, time would not be taken for granted by them, therefore, I see my architecture as a one-shot and everything has to be in the right place. I would take Baudrillard trajectory towards simulation in reverse, not to represent anything, but to mount the present by representation.

Framing/The Crystals of time

Cinema does not just present images, it encloses them with a world. These re-collation images contain spatial and visual information regarding the base story to shape a narrative. The elements transfer data and meaning.

To form this world all the probs and meanings are combined together in consecutive frames, however, what makes it interesting is the resonance between the actual image and virtual image of the same frame; a story is made of its ingredients: people, spaces and story, yet at the same time you can write your own story with the very same elements.

As an architect, you are not only in charge of controlling materials, walls, technicalities, structure, etc, now you have more materials in your hands, being able to change the narratives, your wooden wall, photo-voltaic panels, bushy landscape, big windows are now corresponding to the story, imagining the context and defining as Deleuze calls it the 'silver crystal' point between actual and virtual image.

Temple of thoughts/body

“...’ We do not know even what a body can do’: in its sleep, in its drunkness, in its efforts and resistances...It is through the body that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thoughts... (Deleuze,2000).

Expanding the idea of programming from essential use to probable free acts might be a smart action towards making a space respecting the dynamism of events that might happen there. As architecture has been trying to find the best way to make certain ground rules regarding programming, It has always been disputed over the role of programming architecture to actually form the architecture, from functionalism’s’ “form follows function’ to modernisms’ “form follows form”. “In any case, enough programs managed to function in buildings conceived for an entirely different purpose to prove the simple point that there was no necessary causal relationship between function and subsequent form, or between a given building type and a given use (Tschumi,1981).

With these mentioned, technically we may be able to assume a probable initial tendency of entering into architectural projects, but the way of using, being, and experiencing the space would be a mystery if we only cling to the architecture’s programming justification. Tschumi mocked the conventional programming by saying ‘Last night I cooked in the bathroom and slept on the kitchen floor’.

To imagine spatial qualities and experiments, we need to take all the story probes into account, statics and dynamics, physical and non-physical, temporary, and constant. Every frame base on individuals’ points of view, state, age, etc.. is a two-dimensional canvas with depth as a third dimension, A framework to trace, simulate, compose and design architecture or in a broader word life in architectural spaces.

Considering shots as the scale of the narrative

The difference between the architectural framing and the photographic image follows from this. Photography is a kind of ‘molding’: the mold organizes the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant as an immobile section. However, modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached, and constantly modifies the mold, constitutes a variable, continuous, temporal mold.

“Architecture has always been as much about the event that takes place in space as about the space itself”(Tschumi,1994), similar to a film which wants to describe the life and a story. It draws consecutive events in order to create a strong scheme to be able to involve the audiences to carve a poignant memory of a virtual small world into the deepest layers of the viewer's minds. Sometimes with an extraordinary storyline, or unusual sets of objects and sometimes to create a vivid and strong presence using different kinds of cinematography techniques. 

There is a one-to-one analogy between types of shots and architectural scales, not buildings scale but design scales. In each stage of design in urban programming, to master-plans, to neighborhoods, to buildings, to interiors, and finally detail designs, you may consider different materials, strategies, and work-flows to work with, different worlds yet connected. On the other hand, Cinema has many types of shots to tell a story; The Aerial shot to film from the air and is often used to establish a location_usually picturesque _, the Establishing shot to frame the head of the scene and establishes the location the action is set on, the Wide shot to frame the subject from the top of their head to their feet whilst capturing their environment and the Close-up to frame from above the shoulders and keeps only actor’s face in full frame.

Employing cinematic literature amongst architectural principles create a dynamic work-flow to see the architecture inside-out and outside-in, to balance static and dynamic elements.

The Moving Landscape

Regardless of technicalities, architects are inspired by the moving elements on the land. designers bridge between the understanding of the landscape of design and the landscape itself, the one that creates feelings in your heart and sharpens your imagination. “Tend to see our external physical landscape of life and our inner landscape of the mind as two distinct and separate categories “(Pallasmaa. 2000).

We have to understand we do not live in the two separate worlds of physical and mental, however, these projections are fused together into one singular reality, therefore, developing the sense of understanding the interaction of inner and outer landscape is absolutely necessary, this might be the only way to be in harmony with the landscape and environment.

In the Zeitgeist of our time, theoretical and narrative explanations of buildings have often seemed more important than their actual design, It might be caused by an abundance of material and technology available not only for architects but other people who tend to create “staggering” architecture, therefore, the way you breed ideas in a certain narrative gives the project personality and background. Albeit, maybe there has been always a gap between actual design and concepts that now it can be filled with the well-constructed storytelling by understanding the actual and virtual landscape of the building and mind, the approach of framing outside from the inner side and inside from the outer side. 

Story by an Architect

There is an unknown ambiguity when we use the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘architecture’. They are connected, somehow we are lost in many definitions of narratives of the 20th century until now. From the 50s and 60s manifestos about reforming architecture to critical publications in the 70s and 80s arguing why architecture happens and the emergence of cybernetics paradigms in the 90s till today.

The terms ‘narrative’ and ‘architecture’ have been intertwined in history, yet they may not seem to be natural bedfellows by essence. "In today’s sense, they suffer from slightly oppositional problems: the former proliferated and diluted, the latter restricted and reduced. In the media, 'reference' to ‘narrative’ is now so commonplace as to evade meaning."(Coates, 2012)

There is a question on how narrative applies to architecture. We shall see how narrative in space as opposed to literature or cinema has a firm basis in the way each of us learns to navigate and map the world around us. Within the framework of these personal spatial experiences, we would explore how narrative constructs can engage with the medium of space and frame. This will provide a framework for how architecture can be invested with narrative as a means to give it meaning based on experience.

"Ric?ur characterizes the phenomenon of experiencing time during a narrated story, ‘as a temporal totality and as the creation of a mediation between time as passage and time as duration’ (Ric?ur 1991, 22). While narrating or listening to a story, our imagination creates a unique mental space in which we experience time as passage and as duration at the same time.” Excerpt From: Sylvain De Bleeckere and Sebastiaan Gerards. “Narrative Architecture."(Bleeckere & Gerards, 2017)

Narratives have been creating this phenomenon of solidifying thoughts and forces of nature into memories in order to travel through time. Their overarching themes lie at the heart of the major religions and cultures. Narratives that personify ethical or existential questions have profoundly shaped our understanding of space; these mythical tales and parables have the power to mediate between the spatial configuration of the world, of positive and negative, and the everyday world and its reality of being acknowledged, livelihood and territory. 

The Closing Scene

Architecture has always had a mission to make spaces for people and it has evolved with people and the life of people. Architecture has tried to make a place for hopes, dreams, needs, ambition, and events, the same things that cinema attempts to layout in the first place.

Both architects and directors are in full comprehension of elements of their frameworks, and both are supercritical about space/frame to be working with people and story/life.

Too many similarities embedded in both professions and the tools and ideas cannot be exchanged unless we draw a clear one-to-one analogy between every architectural and every cinematic element.  

References

Bleeckere, S. D., & Gerards, S. (2017). Narrative architecture: A designer's story. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Coates, N. (2012). Narrative architecture. Chichester: Wiley. Gilles, Deleuze,2000,’Cinema ,The Athlone Press ,London.

Medium. (2018). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Analysis: Remembering Love. [online] Available at: https:// medium.com/@Scultpting_In_ Frames/eternal-sunshine-of- the-spotless-mind-analysis- remembering-love-9fdab3e43266

Pallasmaa, Juhani,2007,’New Architectural Horizons’, ‘Architectural Design’, Vol 77, Wiley, No.2,pp.16-23.

Schott. (2017). Iannis Xenakis 95. [online] Available at: https:// en.schott-music.com/iannis- xenakis-95/

Tschumi, Bernard,1994,’ Crossprogramming:’, ‘Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color ‘, pp. 192-195.

Tschumi, Bernard,1981,’ Program:’, ‘Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color ‘, pp. 192-195.

Vidler, Anthony,1993,’ The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary’, Assemblage, No. 21, pp. 44-59.