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A theoretical part of my master thesis on Imagination in reception of architectureal form translated into English.
IMAGINATION IN PERCEPTION OF ARCHITECTURAL FORM 1
FUNCTION
Film uses architecture both for building an atmosphere and making the story plausible. It must be interesting to see a point of view of a set designer searching for a perfect place to shoot a scene. His understanding of "fitness" of architecture, diverging from an architect perspective since it is freed from concerns of actual functionality, can focus on bringing up the meaning contained in a visual aspect of a building.
Results are often surprising, especially for architects. Would Dominique Perrault ever suspect, when designing the Berlin velodrome, that it would be portrayed as headquarters of secret service. Actually, its round plan, shiny steel net covering the facade and circular pattern on the roof evokes an idea of a hidden building loaded with advanced electronic equipment. It is hardly difficult to imagine it as a spaceship in an upcoming sci-fi movie.
This way of reading architecture, directed at non-professionals, often happens to actual buildings and building projects outside cinema. The viral image of a winning entry for a Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by Christian Kerez with a photoshopped Carrefour logo shows how distorted might be the meaning of a building taken out of it conceptual context. How do we recognize a museum, if we uproot a building from a conventional meaning acquired through every-day use.
Such problems were considered by naoclassic french architects belonging to architecture parlante movement, a term coined by Claude Nicolas Ledoux. His projects such as a house for a cooper shaped like a barrel or a house for a damn guard with a river running through it or a public house base on a fallic floor plan, evoke simple associations with tools of each profession. The same kind of building meaning appears currently in building named "ducks" by Robert Venturi.
ROBERT VENTURI
Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building-becomes-sculpture we call the duck in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in, “The Long Island Duckling,” illustrated in God’s Own Junkyard by Peter Blake.
Venturi calls by this name buildings subordinated to conveying the idea, giving as an extreme example hot-dog booths shaped like a hot-dog.
ALDO ROSSI 2
Confront the built form — it reminds you of other buildings and other experiences you have had before — this new building feels familiar and established in your understanding of “the given”—yet, you experience this building as something different, it’s meaning has changed from what you thought it should be because of the change in how you use the architecture—”the given” is expanded, enriched with new meaning...
Meaning is created by associations with other buildings we remember. It could be childhood iconic image of a pitched roof house with a cat on a fence or commonly accepted model of a public building. By analogy we assume that similar objects have the same function.
Each new building is inscribed in historical context, it cannot escape it. It becomes part of a history of architecture and can only less or more consciously build on references to it.
ROBERT VENTURI 3
Architects can bemoan or try to ignore them (referring to the ornamental and decorative elements in buildings) or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with).
Aldo Rossi was a supporter of using "type" in architecture. The notion arrived in 1771 with "Cours d'Architecture" by Jacques Francois Blondel, who nota bene taught Ledoux. The author attempted to connect a character type with a specific function in a list of 64 species of buildings.
Similar, but much comprehensive classification of types was published in 1801 by Jean Nicolas Louis Durand. It was a catalogue of historic objects presented alongside contemporary buildings in the same scale. Using comparative analysis he narrowed architecture down to recombination of simplified patterns. It was to become a grammar of architecture allowing to create new structures in a semi-automatic fashion.
JEAN NICOLA LOUIS DURAND 4
But is it true that the principal aim of architecture is to please and that decoration is its principal concern? [...] Certainly, the grandeur, magnificence, variety, effect, and character that are observed in buildings are all beauties, all causes of the pleasure that we derive from looking at them. But where is the need to run after such things, if a building is disposed in a manner fitted to its intended use? Will it not differ sensibly from another building intended for some other use? Will it not naturally possess a character – and, what is more, a character of its own?
Character was an axis of neoclassical thinking. Differences of opinions arose on what the character was expressing. Durand, Ledoux and also Quatremere de Quincy or Schinkel believed it should inform about the function of a building, while for Etienne-Louis Boulle it served evoking emotional aspect of architecture.
EMOTIONS
Boulle, similar to de Quincy, considered nature primary source of inspiration. He didn't look for harmony in it, an antidote to arbitrariness of contemporary architecture, but in his eccentric projects he tried to capture the natures grandeur.
ETIENNE-LOUIS BOULLE 5
I tried to apply all the models the nature and art offered me in order to present the image of the great [...] The picture of the great has such sway over our senses that, even if we consider it horrible, it always provokes us a feeling of admiration. A volcano spewing lava and death is a terribly beautiful image!
Hence enormous size of his projects, such as Newton's cenotaph, a giant sphere resembling a night sky during the day and light by a sun-like light during the night. On charging architecture with emotions he writes:
ETIENNE-LOUIS BOULLE
o produce sad and dark images it is necessary to present architecture by means of a completely bare wall, as I intended in some funerary buildings, showing a picture of sunken architecture by means of low proportions and buried into the ground...
While Boulle advocates using platonic solids to evoke the sublime, ruin theorists find the same effect in crumbling down walls and its jagged lines. Simultaneously with the fall of neoclassicism a romantic style was gaining importance. The category of picturesque was brought to attention, which considered certain features of landscape evoking powerful emotional reaction. In case of ruins the main feeling is nostalgia, sorrow and a consciousness of passing and vanity. On the other hand its jagged , irregular lines are pleasant to the eye bringing positive esthetic feeling.
Deteriorating buildings appearing in movies evoke similar impression. Ruined rooms of Andriej Tarkovsky "Stalker" create a poetic, meditative atmosphere.
JUHANNI PALLASMAA 6
As he allows erosion and mold to corrode the walls, rain penetrate the roof and water flood the floor, he takes away the building's mask of utility, which addresses our reason and common sense. He removes the inaccessible and rejecting perfection of the building, and reveals the vulnerability of its structures, conceived for eternity. He makes the viewer invest his/her feelings and empathy in the naked structure. A useful building addresses our reason, whereas a ruined building awakens our imagination and unconscious fantasies.
It's not the case with modern ruins. They are simply abandoned by people and their lives happening within, dead.
BERNARD TSCHUMI 7
Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of Its walls. Murder in the Street differs from Murder in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the street differs from the Street of Love. Radical.
When a building is left without movement its atmosphere becomes clear. Slight differences of details, different light and material textures makes rooms of similar floor plan wake up radically different emotions. En empty corridor may seem oppressing or nostalgic. At the same time it says something about its purpose, it is either an aseptic hospital or prison corridor or a warm hotel hallway. We instantly recognize space of a shopping mall or a parking lot. Sometimes it is more difficult and we need more precise clues, such as large windows betraying a classroom or moldings and a desk left behind in a room who probably served as an office. An image of bare, weathered walls of dark cellars and bunkers, especially when we are inside them, makes us scared.
Abandoned architecture gets filled with ghosts. There are traces left by its former inhabitants, which are guidelines for our imagination. Uninhabited houses become haunted by losing their human dimension. They become horror movie sets. Empty hallways of the hotel from Staley Kubrick's "Shining" bring up eerie visions, leading the main character to insanity. Hitchcock also locates his thrillers in desolate, empty places. The scene of murder in "Psycho" happens in a white sterile bathroom resembling a laboratory.
JUHANI PALLASMAA
As the narrative progresses, Hitchcock gradually empties a building of its emotional content - or, more precisely, prevents the viewer from projecting his/her positive emotions onto it - and then fills it with terror...
The the phenomenon of imagination projection appears again and again, either it is projecting on film or ruins or architecture. It happens because the processes behind projection-identification lie a the base of experience both real and cinematic.
EDGAR MORIN 8
Projections is a common and polymorphic phenomenon. In the process of cinematic experience we project our desires, obsessions, fears, and anxieties not only into the void of our dreams and imagination nut onto things and all other beings as well.
It also distorts our memories, attributing our intentions to other people, makes us see solely human features in living things and inanimate objects. The identification process turned the other way becomes "absorbing the world within", which is responsible for seeing oneself as part of the world and emotional participation. Both processes create a complex, which runs our subjective reception of reality. They are two complementing directions of the movement of imagination.
In cinema those phenomena are well know, since emotional participation forms its core. The evolution of cinematography is a record of inventing techniques of intensifying it. Started with a show of daily life scenes in 1895 by Lumiere brothers it went through subsequent stages discovering montage, camera movement, new kinds of shots. Over time joined techniques led to cinema's specific language, which pillars are kinesthetic processes (dazzling motion), framing (top and bottom shots, out-of-frame space) and montage (rhythm, juxtaposing shots, conceptual montage).
MOTION
There are similar techniques in architect's repertoire. Le Corbusier, fascinated by accomplishments of Siergiej Eisenstein, the creator of Russian school of montage, confesses:
LE CORBUSIER 9
In my own work I seem to think as Eisenstein does in his films. [...] The architectural spectacle offers itself consecutively to view; ... you play with the flood of light [...] a true architectural promenade offers constantly changing views, unexpected, at times surprising.
Eisenstein in his essay "Montage and architecture" on the other hand analyses architecture from the camera point of view.
SIERGIEJ EISENSTEIN 10
Nowadays it is the imaginary path followed by the eye and the varying perceptions of an object that depend on how it appears to the eye. [...] In the past, however, the opposite was the case: the spectator moved between carefully disposed phenomena that he observed sequentially with his visual sense.
He shows the camera motion as a base for design of Acropolis or Chartres cathedral: subsequent views and frames open with a cinematic precision, broad shots are intertwined with close-ups directed at ornaments, faces of sculptures and so on.
Movement in film is not only the camera motion, but also, chronologically first, mise an scene, movement of characters and objects, dynamics of a shot and action. Without in-frame movement there is no cinema but a series of photographs.
Eisenstein developed a special technique of motion notation, marking its lines and main directions. It inspired Bernard Tschumi to attempt notating motion in architectural space. Using the same technique he notates actions of an imagined event: an escape through Central Park. Events such as the one in "Manhattan transcript", beyond the functional program, uncover unexpected aspects of space.
The most extreme cases show how fragile are the categories of meaning. A terrorist attack on Dubrovka theatre in Moscow in 2002 was a prime example. Aside from the fact, that within the context of the interrupted play the attack could be seen as part of the theatrical illusion, for several days the auditorium which held 900 hostages became a scene of a rather real drama. The spectators equipped with explosive charges became actors, aisles become trenches filled with mines. In the meantime water from a broken pipe starts to flood the building. The orchestra pit becomes a common outhouse, the stench is unbearable. Comfy chairs become uncomfortable beds, the audience and scene swap places: the hostages-spectators are watched by the terrorists from the scene.
A building, like a movie set, changes its meaning according to the events taking place within it. Their character and choreography of people in space creates "architectonic spectacle".
PETER ZUMTHOR 11
Ettore Scola's film "Le bal" recounts fifty years of European history with no dialogue and a complete unity of place. It consists solely of music an the motion of people moving and dancing. We remain in the same room with the same people throughout, while time goes by and the dancers grow older.
The focus of the film is on its main characters. But it is the ball-room with its tiled floor and its paneling, the stairs in the background and the lion's paw at the side which creates the film's dense, powerful atmosphere. Or is it the other way round? Is it the people who endow the room with its particular mood?
FRAME
JEAN NOUVEL 12
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 [...]. In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings [...]. I like to work with a depth of field, reading space in terms of its thickness, hence the superimposition of different screens, planes legible from obligatory joints of passage which are to be found in all my buildings [...]
The basis for both cinema and architecture is framing. The work of architect and a director consists extensively on designing a sequence of frames. Within reality of architect's work a set of visualizations becomes more important than other elements of the project, because it affects emotion. Pallasmaa compares a movie director to a magician, and an architect to a surgeon.
JUHANI PALLASMAA
The film director is the magician who evokes a lived situation from a distance through the illusory narrative of projected images, whereas the architect operates with the physical reality itself in the very intestines of the building which we inhabit.
While frame is just a part architecture, there is nothing but it in film. For that its theory within cinema is developed much further. It specifies not only basic shots: from panorama, through American and full shot to close-up together with their respective emotional influence. It also treats such aspects as meaning of camera directions.
For example in "Der Letzte Man" from 1924, telling a story of a fall of a hotel doorman, the main character through the first part of the movie is shown from the bottom, which emphasizes his position, from the moment he loses his position and continuing degradation he is shown from above.
The framing of architectural elements have an equally important influence. Stairs seen from below are a scene for the character to step down on or from which he retreats, stairs leading upwards are stairway to heaven. Stairs leading downwards lead to abyss, seen from above escape the frame, causes vertigo.
Frame has a structure too. It can be saturated or dense. It can place scene elements in the middle or cut them in half, "deframe"
Andre Bazin describes two meanings, two functions of a frame13. it is either an aperture extracting a fragment of space (as for example in Jean Renoir movies) or a perimeter for a set of objects (like in Hitchcock). In both cases framing describes out-of-frame space, the fragments links to invisible elements of space and focuses emotion (a glass of milk becomes a symbol of madness in one of Hitchcock movies)
A fragment, architectonic detail is an important element conveying meaning. Through its small size and intelligible form is a clear sign in space.
BERNARD TSCHUMI 14
Fragments of architecture [bits of walls, of rooms, of streets, of ideas] are all one actually sees. These fragments are like beginnings without ends. There is always a split between fragments that are real and fragments that are virtual, between memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other than being the passage from one fragment to another. They are rather relays than signs. They are traces. They are in-between.
Fragments of ruins and excavated artifacts are also clues who lead archeologists to reconstructing histories that happened in the building's past. They also make our memory, like proustian madeleine and tea, bring up memories of places and emotion. Peter Zumthor starts his book "Thinking architecture" in the style of Proust:
PETER ZUMTHOR
I used to take a hold of it [a door handle] when I went into my aunt's garden. That handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house.
A fragment in the context of building can be understood not only as an object, but as the architects of Vals baths say, as a room. Isolating it from surroundings enables him to capture a unique atmosphere within it. An illusion to be complete and convincing must be isolated from distraction, in the manner that a movie shot is rid of movie set equipment. Only then a room may become an independent frame and a building can be assembled as their sequence.
MONTAGE
Frames of a movie come into relations producing additional meaning which is not present in any of them apart. We tend to connect scenes placed next to each other, an interior preceded by an outside view of a building becomes a room in it. When we see a character running through a maze of corridors in "Hanna", followed by a scene of her climbing out of a manhole in the middle of a desert, we assume that it must have been a secret underground prison, while the escape scene was actually shot in an aerodynamic tunnel located typical industrial building in Berlin.
Famous Kuleshov's experiment shows how we assume different emotions behind the same face based on the preceding image: a bowl of soup - hunger, a woman - lust, a coffin - sorrow. Eisenstein considered montage the main element of cinematic language, capable of communicating ideas as precisely as literary language.
Similar belief characterized postmodern architects. A building in their hands became a collage o fragments, quotes from classics mixed with modern elements, juxtaposed, deformed and stripped of their initial meaning, shaped into a form, that could be read as a book.
Although such arrangements appeared before, which can be seen for example in the play of elements characteristic for houses and ships in Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, postmodernism made it its main focus and connected it with theory of semiotics drawn from linguistics and social studies.
It resulted in structuralism movement, which saw within the means of architectural expression a structure analogical to language, which could be assembled into sentences similarly to Durand's types.
For Venturi, cited above, architecture is a domain of contradictions, unsolvable conflicts between form and function, hence his careless attitude to design. Building's expression is in his opinion an effect of a casual play of elements stemming organically from its function, with zgrzyty and distortions present. In a project for a house in Philadelphia Venturi arranged a broad chimney symbolizing family hearth , triangular shape of the roof resembling tympanum and a purely decorative arch broken in the middle.
For Peter Eisenman architecture is a field of study on the structure of language of form, which he conducts with total seriousness. In his projects of houses numbered with Roman numerals, he uses architectonic elements as word in a sentence, subjecting them to various manipulations like scaling, rotating and translating. Speaking a language of geometry he creates paper architecture, disconnected from its materiality. Each of the projects is accompanied by a text explaining the process. Would it be possible to read author's intentions without it?
It seem that fiasco of structuralist approach lies in a wrong assumption that architecture can be read as text.
BERNARD TSCHUMI
The text instead is composed of fragments that relate only loosely to one another. These fragments - geometry, mask, bondage, excess, eroticism - are all to be considered not only within the reality of ideas but also within the reality of the reader's spatial experience: a silent reality that cannot be put on paper.
Pavilions in Park La Vilette designed by Tschumi and Eisenman's houses are surprisingly alike. Follies arranged on a grid are objects without function, free of associations and meaning and thus open to our projections didn't work. There is simply no place to anchor our imagination.
There is a project by Eisenman which is completely different from his early attempts, it's a Monument of Jews Murdered in Europe. In signals a shift from mainly intellectual formal systems towards emotional and physiologic impact by becoming material and engaging senses.
The direction it's heading is phenomenology, which assumes sensational inseparability of experience.
PETER ZUMTHOR
The sense that I try to instill into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language that we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just this way in this one building.
Experience of architecture is a complex phenomena, as seen by Zumthor, which engages all senses and which isn't a simple "reading of text". As in Louis Kahn's architecture, the association with antiquity isn't achieved by placing a Doric column or a tympanum but it is felt with the whole body and penetrates the character of a building.
The language of architecture doesn't follow trails marked by spoken and written language. It's closer to the language of cinema, which isn't surprising, since both of them concern experience of space in motion. Architecture and film are witnessed, as Walter Benjamin points out, in the state of diffused attention, unconsciously by being absorbed.
Psychic processes responsible for reading the meaning of architectural form are base on projection-identification complex and emotional participation fueled by imagination.
A building just as a movie screen or a ruin is an object we project our imagination on. But it has to be triggered by a link to our memory's emotional deposit. It can be a figurative element, a plan of the room, texture of its walls, smell, lighting. The crucial aspect is for the form to leave space for the other half of this two-way process.
1 A chapter of my master thesis Centre for Film and Visual Arts in Kazimierz Dolny. Imagination in perception of architectural form (2012) translated from Polish version.
2 Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, 1981
3 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1977
4 Jean NIcolas Louis Durand, Précis des Leçons d’architecture donnée a l’Ecole Polytechnique, 1805
5 Étienne-Louis Boullée, Architecture, Essai sur l'art, 1793
6 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, 2000
7 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities, 1994
8 Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, 1975
9 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of emotion: journeys in art, architecture, and film, 2003
10 Siergiej Eisenstein, Montage and architecture, 1938
11 Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 1998
12 Juhani Pallasmaa, op. cit.
13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema, 2009
14 Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture, 1990
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