MIES VAN DER ROHE AND THE MOVING IMAGE Lutz Robbers A ...

The popularity of the film-architecture analogy has also elicited critical voices. Roger
Connah, for instance, while acknowledging that “earlier in the century, the very ubiquitous
poetics of the ‘motion’ picture could not have failed to inform, distract, and interfere with many
earlier architects,” 81 the modalities of these interferences remain open to interpretations. Due to
the lack of serious interrogation of what cinema actually is, the medium has remained susceptible
to be “hijacked” by certain architectural discourses. In particular, he points to contemporary
architecture infatuation with the dazzling “image-thinking” or “phraseology” 82 of
poststructuralist thought. The latter’s preoccupation with movement, incompletion, deferral,
event – metaphors of thought that film most convincingly embodies – has inspired architects to
‘visualize’ these concepts more or less literally in the form of architectural objects. 83 Filmic
terms like ‘framing,’ ‘montage,’ ‘sequence,’ or ‘(jump)cuts’ have become commonplace lingo in
architectural debates. Architects like Bernhard Tschumi, who describes his Manhattan
Transcipts as being “not unlike an Eisenstein film script,” openly reference film theory as the
source of inspiration for their design. 84
Kester Rattenbury even goes as far to argue that much of
postmodernism’s use of the film-architecture symbiosis resembles a “pornographic reshaping of
architectural space into perceived and replicated experience,” a narcissist, self-destructive
81
Roger Connah, How Architecture Got Its Hump (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 3.
82
Ibid., 28.
83
See also M. Christine Boyer critique of the poststructuralist thinking in contemporary
architectural thought. M. Christine Boyer, Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of
Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 26-38.
84
Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1981), 7. Tschumi
explicitly founds his design on a conception of the cinematic image: “The Transcripts are thus
not self-contained images. They establish a memory of the preceding frame, of the course of
events. Their final meaning is cumulative; it does not merely depend on a single frame (such as a
façade), but the succession of frames and space.” Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, 11.
37