CINEMA AND ARCHITECTURE

What once was created uniquely by film-makers, a screen environment where fact and fiction could be
offered in all combinations as a continuum in time, is now becoming an everyday part of the creative
realm of architecture. The areas of interest, the traditional skills, the arts and sciences of film and
architecture, are reaching a symbiosis early practitioners could imagine but few could attain."
Franois Penz & Maureen Thomas
We live in a world in which the experienced, remembered, and imagined, as well as the past, present,
and future are inseparably intermixed. Place and event, space and mind, are not outside of each other.
They mutually define one another and fuse into a singular experience. The world of film allows us to
experience this duality perhaps more clearly than anywhere else. Film allows for a passage to another
world, transporting the audience to spaces that perhaps make us feel more real than anything we
experience in our daily lives. We allow ourselves to become absorbed by the stories, the characters, and
the environments and are transported into an entirely different plane of reality; a place more about
psychological connections than physical ones. Space, both cinematic and architectural, is a delicate and
artistic balance of psychological and experiential factors. Both forms of art define situations of human
interaction, frames of life and horizons for understanding our world; however, I feel movies have an
unparalleled ability to affect both our emotions and our memories in ways that quality architectural
spaces do. Architecture has never been just about the walls and columns that make it up, just as a film is
more than just as montages of images on a screen.
"Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a
building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage
Through which one passes..."
Jean Nouvel
Art (what I make out of it as of now) is a process in which the artist makes the use of his/her personal
experiences, intuition, or inspiration, selecting and arranging it to create beautiful and true artistic
objects which to a greater or lesser extent imitate reality or the existing and that through these objects
he/she communicates his experience to the audience/spectator.
Film and architecture medium gives us more of physical reality than any other form of art. Both of them
are a total art and they have encouraged people to think that the way to artistic perfection lies in
approaching nearer and nearer to full physical reality. Whether real or imaginary there is an inextricable
link between the creation of films and development of our built environment, at least in the exploration
of volumetric space in time. In both the cases the reality is proposed and the imagination is left to fill the
gaps, the key difference is the element of control. The actual experience of an architectural space within
that space has many similarities to the viewers perception of a chosen sequence in a film. Films
exaggerate and portray a larger than life view, this require films to create their own worlds.
Architecture in the real world has a lot to offer than basic need of shelter it talks about the time, the
era it belongs to, it is indicative of its culture and its people architecture has a story to tell.

The capacity to actualize the virtual is a fundamental and even traditional aspect of architecture.
From the manipulation of light and space in the works of Borromini to fugitive tectonic effects of Louis
Kahn to captivating and scintillating structures of Santiago Calatrava to Zaha Hadids deconstructivist
archetype, Architectures tangible presence is always informed by a corresponding virtual field.
In its inherent abstractness, music has historically been regarded as the art form which is closest to
architecture. 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. These two art forms create and mediate comprehensive images of life. In the same way that
buildings and cities create and preserve images of culture and a particular way of life, cinema illuminates
the cultural aspect of both the time of its making and the era that it depicts. Both forms of art define the
dimensions and essence of existential space; they both create experiential scenes of life situations.
Film's undoubted ancestor...is -- architecture.
Sergei M. Eisenstein
Walter Benjamins idea suggests that, although the situation of viewing a film turns the viewer into a
bodyless observer, the illusory cinematic space gives the viewer back his/her body, as the experiential
haptic and motor space provides powerful kinesthetic experiences. A film is viewed with the muscles
and skin as much as by the eyes. Both architecture and cinema imply a kinesthetic way of experiencing
space, and images stored in our memory are embodied and haptic images as much as retinal pictures.
Lived space is not uniform, valueless space. One and the same event - a kiss or a murder - is an entirely
different story depending on whether it takes place in a bedroom, bathroom, library, elevator or gazebo.
An event obtains its particular meaning through the time of the day, illumination, weather and
soundscape. In addition, every place has its history and symbolic connotations which merge into the
incident. Presentation of a cinematic event is, thus, totally inseparable from the architecture of space,
place and time, and a film director is bound to create architecture, although often unknowingly. It is
exactly this innocence and independence from the professional discipline of architecture that makes the
architecture of cinema so subtle and revealing.
Film and the city share a dimension of living, that is, the space of one's lived experiences. They are about
lived space, and the fantasy of habitable places. They are both inhabited sites, and spaces for
inhabitation, narrativized by motion. Such types of dwellings always construct subjectivity. Their
subjectivity is a body that occupies narrativized space, and leaves traces of its history on the wall and
the screen. Crossing in-between perceived, conceived and lived space; the spatial arts thus embody the
viewer. "Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is
consummated." An heir to this practice, film continues the architectural habitus. It makes a custom of
constructing sites, and building "sets" of dwelling and motion. It has a habit of consuming space.
It is space which is both used and appropriated. Being at the same time a space of consumption and a
consumption of space, it is a user's space. One lives a film as one lives the space that one inhabits: as an
everyday passage--tangibly. Perceived by way of habit and tactility, cinema and architecture are both a
matter of touch. The haptic path of these two spatial practices touches the physical realm. Their kinetic
affair is a carnal one. In their fictional architectonics, there is a tangible link between space and desire.
Space unleashes desire. The habitus is absorption. In this domain, one absorbs, and is absorbed by,
moving images--tales of inhabitation. The absorption of subject/object in the narrative of space involves
a series of corporeal transformations. As in fashion, the mode of "consumption" involves the ingestion
of body space. Providing space for living and lodging sites of biography, film and architecture are
constantly reinvented by stories of the flesh.

What this research aims in particular, is the notion of creating, the inter-relationship, and the correlation
that might exist between multiple areas of knowledge. The complexity of the age we live in is already
filled with unexpected and appalling situations that will increasingly become even more lymphatic or say
fluid. The term space is the essence of both film and architecture. It has different connotations in both,
and yet both attempt to capture it. Film concerns itself primarily, but not exclusively, to that which is
revealed to the viewer frame by frame. Architecture and Urban Design must contend not only with the
spaces in the frame of view, but the order and structure of the spaces both within and outside a given
perspective. Whether in film or architecture, the use of narrative can provide structure to the
experience encountered as the viewer moves through space. Can we begin to use film to guide the
architectural process by better understanding how film directors have manipulated the medium, and
the user, to create experiences in multi - dimensional space that have a lasting impact on our real
world?
The objective is to establish film and architecture as two unique worlds which are in some way
interwoven to each other. I am interested in the ways cinema constructs spaces in the mind, creates
mind-spaces, reflecting thus the inherent ephemeral architecture of human mind, thought and emotion.
To explore the relationship between the two worlds not just in their physical relationship, but more as
associated in values in a metaphoric way. This research will try to attend both to the richness of
strategies for using the moving image to represent the built environment, and how architecture and
urban spaces are cast as protagonists, determining action and psychological effects.
The underlying premise is that all forms of plastic art attempt to create a Perfect Illusion. According to
one of the theories, narrative cinema is the prime example of a temporal / casual art, while architecture
is the prime spatial art. When a movie is designed, the architecture of the movie also needs to be
designed so that it is an inherent part of the narrative.
'It is when we touch the depths of personal and collective memory that architecture and cinema reveal
their constructive force. It is when architecture and cinema deploy their physical means, their
interactions and their assemblage that they show their mythopoetic inspiration. The production of
images by cinema is the epitome of the physical construction of space by architecture.'
Pascal Schoning
Thus, space in the cinema is not an intractable, solid thing but almost like a fluid substance capable of all
sorts of changes: something which can be handled on the screen with the same omnipotence as we
manipulate physical space in our thought, imagination or a dream. It displays the features and
properties of abstract space and yet at the same time identifies this abstract space with the reality of
world of our senses. The cinema is capable of demonstrating visually what science has proved
empirically: that the experience of space we obtain through our senses in everyday life has only an
illusory tangibility.

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