Cinematic Architecture / AA Publications

The new book on Cinematic Architecture is out now at AA Publications. Get it via Amazon or the AA! One text which I wrote was skipped for some reason and is not in the book anymore. Shame!
Nevetheless I post it here because it sums up some critical questions about the unit, about my experience as a student and later as a tutor at the Dip3 unit at the Architectural Association...
Above all the text describes the fundamental cultural paradigm shift through the digital revolution!
(Note: The text is not yet corrected, so please apologize "strange German spellings, etc.")



WINDOW WITH A VIEW

Conventional definitions in architecture are often insufficiant to explain terms such as inside and outside. Working in Dip3 unit was about to expand conventional perspectives on architecture. So, Cinematic Architecture would replace the terms inside and outside with terms of „attraction“ and „repulsion“. The contradictions within these two forces are the basis for our movement through space – and the city. Cinematic Architecture is like a constant journey of along a Moebius strip, where inside and outside becomes a constant process (of capturing and editing.)

If the very essence of architecture is about the construction of the space between people, Dip3 can be considered as a building in time. From year to year the people and the techniques have changed to construct it. From making maps, books, writing narratives to making films the unit was like a fluid building with windows that gazed to different places such as Vienna, Paris, Sarajevo and many more. Looking out of windows always puts the gazers´own position in question – and the space he or she inhabits.

Consequently the unit expanded not only the techniques but also the list of materials that are used in conventional architecture. The materials of film are called memory, light, shadow, duration, dynamic and so on. Why not using these materials in architecture just like any other material – or ingredient?

But most important to the unit was always the presence (anwesenheit) of a place.

To some extend architecture and film seem to aproximate, because architecture has become part of a public space, which has turned into the "published space." Thus architecture itself has – in a conventional definition – dematerialised – and has become „just another media“. The crucial element in both film and architecture though is the relationship between "presence" and „absence“. But in both disciplines there seems to be a fundamental difference between the "absence of presence" and the „presence of absence":

Because „only that which is absent can be imagined“ (Ingerid referring to Freud), the presence of all sorts of media functions like a wall that covers the physical world. This hyperreality causes a great feeling of insecurity, because the city is no longer the raw material for memories. The city has become a setting for interactive media events. Public space has become a media construction with its own set of rules established by TV programers and marketing strategists. It has turned into a weird space where media phantasies merge with physicality creating a third space - the "Bastard-Space". Billions of detached images overlay the physical fabric of the city, every second, every minute, every day. Accordingly, public space is overwhelmed by a constant feeling of hysteria. The physical seems to be paralized from the „buzzing hysteria-machine“ and detached from the memories it once stored. Whilst the physical space at the dawn of the clima catastrophy is threatening us, physical architecture has become just another obstacle.
In other words the absence of presence can be understood as a desire to escape the physical presence of the physical environment. It seems like a feeling of alienation as a infantile reaction towards a hostile living environment. Today, interactive media have become a massive tool of creating the absence of presence, to which we get used to. Virtual worlds have become the utopia of the soon-to-come-catastrophy. An architecture developed on Excell-sheets is just a logic consequence of that utopia.

In opposition to the „absence of presence“ stands the „presence of absence“. A priori it defines a presence, which is filled with memory. The presence of absence appears, when a place tells its story. But one needs to listen carefully to the place, just like Wim Wenders does, when he makes his films. The place triggers that which is no longer „here“. The presence of absence is also a strong feeling that Daniel Liebeskind described, when he wrote about Berlin, before building the Jewish Museum. The presence of absence also means a comittment to the physical place and empahty to its lost inhabitants.

Without places no memory – without memory no places!

Cinematic Architectures´dedication is about to get a grip on the presence of all dimensions of the city.  Cinematic Architecture is about the exact opposition of the virtual escapism – it is the disruptive factor in the Matrix. Cinematic Architecture „uses the gradience of the topography“ as Louis Malle once mentioned.  Cinematic architecture may not be efficience driven by making constant detours (just like Louis Malle), but calls for new strategies that today seem to be vitally imortant: strategies that respond to real places, to real people and to real emotions.