The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary

Article published in the «Assemblage » — 1993 — No. 21 (Aug.) — pp. 44-59.Since the late nineteenth century, film has provided a laboratory for the definition of modernism in theory and technique. As the modernist art par excellence, it has also served as a point of departure for the redefinition of the other arts, a paradigm by which the different practices of theater, photography, literature, and painting might be distinguished from each other. Of all the arts, however, it is architecture that lias had the most privileged and difficult relationship to film. An obvious role model for spatial experimentation, film has also been criticized for its deleterious effects on the architectural image. At a moment when interest in film has reemerged in much avant-garde architectural work, from the literal evocations of
Bernard Tschumi in his Manhattan Transcripts and projects for La Villette to more theoretical work on the relations of space to visual representation, the complex question of film's architectural role is again on the agenda. And the more so, because in the search for ways to represent movement and temporal succession in architecture, "deconstructivist" designers have turned naturally to the images forged by the first, constructivist, avant-garde — images themselves deeply marked by the impact of the new filmic techniques. In their new incarnation, such constructivist and expressionist images.