Visual Studies: Four Takes on Spatial TurnsAuthor(s): Giuliana BrunoSource: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 23-24Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068236 .Accessed: 09/06/2011 19:06

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Visual Studies: Four Takes on Spatial Turns

GIULIANA BRUNO Harvard University

The art that is closest to cinema is architecture.

Ren? Clair

The intersection of urban culture, architecture, and film is a most fertile and productive field of research. After decades of literary domination, Cinema Studies has joined in the spatial turn that cultural history and theory have taken in recent years. Architectural practice and theory have, in turn, embraced a mobilized, cinematic perspective, interacting in different ways with the discourse of moving images. Here are four filmic "takes" on this vital intersection from my perspective.

Take One: History And Modernity Film's undoubted ancestor. . . is?architecture.

Sergei M. Eisenstein

The relation of architecture to the moving image is, first and foremost, a product of history. The first useful direction of research is a re-vision of nineteenth-century history and

modernity. Film is a product of modernity, the era of the

metropolis, and has expressed an urban viewpoint from its

very origin. On the eve of the invention of cinema, a net

work of architectural forms produced a new spatio-visuality. Sites of transit such as arcades, bridges, railways, the elec

tric underground, powered flight, skyscrapers, department stores, the pavilions of exhibition halls, glass houses, and

winter gardens incarnated the new geography of modernity. Mobility?a form of cinematics?was the essence of these

new architectures. By changing the relation between spa

tial perception and bodily motion, the architectures of tran sit prepared the ground for the invention of the moving image. On this spatial map of modernity, the film specta tor, a relative of the railway passenger and the urban stroller,

became the new fl?neur.

Take Two: Spatial Critical Theory Couldn't an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? . . .

From the compression of a century-long movement of streets,

boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour?

Walter Benjamin

The link between film and urban culture that has emerged in cultural history is also a function of the critical dunking on

modernity. Recent innovative scholarship on modernity engages with the shifting perceptual arena of a moving urban culture. And cinema participates in this new traveling cultural

geography for its constant haptic reinvention of space. Think of Siegfried Kracauer, who, long ago, recognized film's mov

ing, tangible attraction for the city: the street, the pavement, feet walking over stones. The affinity between cinema and the

city street pertains to the transient, for the street?like the cinema?is the site of transient impressions. In new paths of research on space, the image of the city interacts very closely

with filmic representations. Cinema joins architectural prac tice as an art form of the street, an agent in the building of

city views. The streetscape becomes as much a filmic "con

struction" as it is an architectural one.

Take Three: Filmic And Architectural Promenades

Space ... exists in a social sense only for activity?for (and by virtue of) walking ... or traveling.

Henri Lefebvre

New historical and theoretical directions of research rec

ognize the filmic path as the modern version of the archi tectural itinerary. This connection is furthermore textual, for it engages our ability to read space. An architectural ensemble is read as it is traversed. This is also the case for the cinematic spectacle, for film is read as it is traversed and is readable insofar as it is traversable. As we go through it, it goes through us. A "visitor" is the subject of this prac

tice?a passage through spaces of light. She who wanders through a building or a site acts pre

cisely like a film spectator absorbing and connecting visual

spaces. The changing position of a body in space creates both architectural and cinematic grounds. Architectural

frames, like film frames, are transformed by an open rela tion of movement to events. These movements are prac

tices of space, that is, tangible plots of everyday life.

Ultimately, this is how urban experiences?dynamics of

space, movement, and lived narrative?embody the effect of the cinema, and its intimate promenades.

LEARNING FROM ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 23

Take Four: Haptic Design

Spatial design today means a weaving together of spatial ele

ments, which are mostly achieved in invisible but clearly dis cernible relationships of multidimensional movement and in

fluctuating energy relationships.

L?szl? Moholy-Nagy

This new research on space and motion ultimately touches

on internally mobilized territories?inner landscapes. Like the city, motion pictures move both outward and inward:

they journey through the space of the imagination, the site of memory, and the topography of affects. It is this mental

itinerary that, finally, makes film the art that is closest to architecture. Just like architecture, cinema creates mental

and emotional maps, acting as membrane for a multifold

transport. Layers of cultural memory, densities of hybrid his

tories, and psychogeographic transport are housed by film's

spatial practice of cognition. A vehicle for cultural voyages, cinema offers tracking shots to traveling cultures. Like the

city itself, it is a moving inner landscape, a mobile map?a trace of inner differences as well as cross-cultural travel.

In conclusion, to adopt this mobile urban viewpoint for both architecture and film?two seemingly static and opti cal activities?we must transform our sense of these art

forms, To join the paths of research on architecture and cin ema, not optically but haptically, is to corrode oppositions such as immobility-mobility, inside-outside, private-public, dwelling-travel. Architecture and cinema are permeable

spaces. In between housing and motion, these spaces ques

tion the very limits of the opposition. They force us to rethink cultural expression itself as a site of interior-exte rior travel and dwelling?an interstitial space.

GiuLiANA bruno is a professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard

University. Her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film

(New York, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award. Her earlier book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, 1993), won the Kov?cs prize for best book in film studies. Bruno has published work on visual arts and archi

tecture in La ville au cin?ma (Paris, 2005), Production Design+Film (Berlin, 2005), Arts & Architecture, 1900-2000 (Milan, 2004), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

(Amsterdam, 2003), and Anytime (New York, 2001).

24 JSAH / 65:1, MARCH 2006

Article Contentsp. 23p. 24

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 1-152Front MatterLearning from Architectural HistoryIntroduction [pp. 5-6]History of Science: How Buildings Matter [pp. 7-8]Early Modern History: The Built Environment and Luxury Consumption [pp. 9-10]European Social History: Questions for Architectural Historians [pp. 10-11]American Social History: A Historian's Labor in the Built Environment [pp. 11-12]Contemporary History: The Politics of Architectural History and the Construct of a "New" Europe [pp. 12-14]Urban History: What Architecture Does, Historically Speaking... [pp. 14-15]Landscape History: Material and Metaphorical Regimes [pp. 16-17]Cultural Landscape Studies: Reception and the Social Mediation of Meaning [pp. 17-18]Geography: Buildings as Settings for Seeing Systems and Networks [pp. 18-20]History of Technology: The Lifeworld and the Plasticity of Space [pp. 20-21]History of Technology: Influences on Materials, Form, and Style in the Built Environment [pp. 21-22]Visual Studies: Four Takes on Spatial Turns [pp. 23-24]

Mountain Temples and Temple-Mountains: Masrur [pp. 26-49]Modernization and Mnemonics at Christ Church, Canterbury: The Treasury Building [pp. 50-67]"Amore regolato": Papal Nephews and Their Palaces in Eighteenth-Century Rome [pp. 68-91]Modernist Architecture and Nationalist Aspiration in the Baltic: Two Case Studies [pp. 92-111]ExhibitionsReview: untitled [pp. 112-115]Review: untitled [pp. 115-118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-120]

MultimediaReview: untitled [pp. 121-124]

BooksGreek and Roman ArchitectureReview: untitled [pp. 125-126]Review: untitled [pp. 126-129]

Medieval VeniceReview: untitled [pp. 129-130]

Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism in Seventeenth-Century EuropeReview: untitled [pp. 130-132]Review: untitled [pp. 132-133]Review: untitled [pp. 134-135]

Nineteenth-Century Architecture and TheoryReview: untitled [pp. 136-139]Review: untitled [pp. 139-141]Review: untitled [pp. 141-142]

Builders and Building CodesReview: untitled [pp. 142-144]Review: untitled [pp. 144-146]

CitiesReview: untitled [pp. 146-147]Review: untitled [pp. 147-148]

Abstracts [pp. 149-150]Back Matter