Focusing on this concept sets up another, very different, analogy between Les Carabiniers and the work of SITE. SITE’s continual fusion of art and architecture meant that their work always incorporated references to fields outside the strict confines of architecture: sculpture, painting and graphic design, for example. Operating as a form of intertextuality, this characteristic inevitably engages the public in a game of cross–referencing, which on a surface level is similar to what one finds in Godard’s work. Taking a humoristic approach to these references however, the artistic-architectural fusion SITE employed often involved a sensorial confusion that paralleled the specifics of Michelangelo’s comic confusion as well.
The iconic works of SITE in the 1970s were often deliberately intended to play with our understanding of a building’s physicality. In The Peeling Project, 1972, this manifested itself in a design based on turning the facade of a showroom into an artificial layer that appeared to be coming away from the structure behind (Fig. 4). The brick facade of the building was designed in such a way as to literally “peel away” from its support, much like wallpaper may do from a wall suffering from damp. This optical illusion was created through the use of reinforced brickwork and a cement resin and was intended to give the impression that the facade could, at any moment, collapse on top of the visitor loitering underneath. Producing effects analogous to those of Michelangelo, reactions of building’s visitors ranged from curiosity to bewilderment and, at times, comic fear.
This same illusory game was repeated the following year in a project titled Indeterminate Façade (Houston, Texas); a project commissioned by the same retail client, ironically named “Best Company”. The facade of this building was again the principal arena of play for the architects. In this case, the facade wall projected beyond the roof of the building and its brickwork, once again reinforced, was laid in such a way that it appeared to be “caught” in the act of collapsing.18 In 1977, SITE experimented with another variation on this same theme in the construction of the Notch Project (Sacramento, California) (Fig. 5). In this case, the company’s customers enter through a crack in the principal block of the building, at one of its corners, because the building appears to have sheared apart, with one part of the structure slipping away from the main frame. Thus, once again the visitor wishing to enter the building has to pass under a structure that is apparently about to collapse.19
Figure 4: The Peeling Project, SITE architects, 1972.
Figure 5: The Notch Project, SITE architects, 1977.
Clearly intended to manipulate the perception and expectations of the public, these projects not only play with concepts of art and architecture but also with the ambiguity of the real and the unreal. As with other projects designed by SITE during this period, it was not uncommon to see visitors, normally customers, caught between states of curiosity and fear when confronted with an illusion they had never seen before. Reminiscent of the scenes of Michelangelo in Les Carabiniers, this type of public reaction to humorous commercial buildings is the consequence of an architecture conceived to confront the perceived “functionality” of the Modern Movement. In contrast to theories of modernism, SITE proposed that architecture had no obligation to be “honest to its function”. In fact, it did not even have the obligation to be “real”. What they proposed was that contemporary communicative architecture had to create “special places” and “celebratory buildings” through the employment of whatever vocabulary was appropriate to its society and cultural context, in this case the world of consumer capitalism.
Although SITE themselves claimed that their playful, wistful and, at times, comic architecture was a serious social and political commentary on the modernist establishment, this argument was often ignored by the architectural fraternity who ridiculed their work as a supercilious and faddish approach, as a mere reflection, rather than commentary, on the society of the spectacle. Considered as an architecture whose perspective operates in parallel to that found in Les Carabiniers however, their work may be opened up to a slightly more nuanced reading. Rather than simply representing a rejection of functionalism, and a preference for the commercial and the spectacular, it also becomes interpretable as an ironic commentary on those selfsame social preferences.
Just as the French New Wave rejected the “solemnity” of the French filmmaking establishment in favour of commercial “auteurs”, such as Chaplin and Hitchcock, so too can we read SITE as rejecting established architectural norms and embracing “commercialism”. Similarly, in this light, it becomes arguable to suggest that just as the New Wave’s moves in this direction only heightened their ability to criticise the commercial world, so too did SITE’s. Operating as a multi-layered meta-narrative akin to Les Carabiniers, its referencing of art, its playful inversions of architectural convention and its memorable manipulation of public expectations can all be read as an ironic criticism of a society that preferred the unreal, the hyperreal and the simulacrum over reality, and not necessarily a mere reflection of that society.
The potential power of such a reading is indeed heightened when we consider that this eye-catching, memorable architecture was operating, indeed could only operate, in the purely consumerist field of retail architecture; its multiple manipulations of norms and evidently self-referential comments about its own artificiality resonating ever more loudly in the inevitably “artificial” context of consumer culture. Read in this light, the work of SITE becomes not only a criticism of modernist functionalism, it also potentially operates a cutting criticism of its opposite. By filtering our reading of SITE through the ironic, critical and, at times, sardonic framework of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, we can perhaps attribute to SITE a more subversive interpretation than is often credited to them from within the architectural establishment.
Notes
1Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001. p. 421.
2There are numerous texts on Godard and French New Wave. For an overview of the works of Godard, see: Brody, Richard. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2008.
3For an overview of the historical development and context of the French New Wave and its general cinematographic characteristics, see: Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2nd edition), University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 2007.
4Dipple, Elizabeth. The Unresolvable Plot – Reading Contemporary Fiction, Routledge and Keegan Paul, England, 1988. p. 119.
5Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1979. p. 23.
6Italian Neorealism has been documented by numerous authors. For an historical overview, see: Wagstaff, Christopher. Italian Neorealist Cinema, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2007.
7In the 1920s, the continuity system developed its complex series of rules regarding mise-en-scène, lighting, filming and montage, all of which work together to produce a form of clear and coherent narration. According to these standard rules, a film should only show actions and present dialogue relevant to the development of the story; it should not have alien sounds that distract the viewer from the main action, and the lighting should clearly reveal relevant information such as the expression on the face of the principal actor. For readers unfamiliar with film, see: Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001.
8These ideas were extensively developed in numerous texts by Baudrillard. In particular, see: Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, Semiotext[e], New York, 1983.
9Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes – Travels in Hyperreality, Gruppo Editoriale fabbri-Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A. Milan, 1973.
10For a brief introductory explanation of this story from the history of film, see: Whiting, Jim. Auguste & Louis Lumiere: Pioneers in Cinema Film (Unchartered, Unexplored, and Unexplained), Mitchell Lane Publications, London, 2005. p. 23–25.
11Formed a
t the end of the sixties, the interdisciplinary group SITE was composed of the artists and architects Alison Sky, Emilio Sousa, Michelle Stone and James Wines. They began to build ironic, humoristic and highly polemic architectural projects at the beginning of the 1970s. See: Wines, James. SITE: Identity in Density, Images Publishing Dist Ac, New York, 2006.
12Wines, James. “Narrative Architecture”, Architecture and Urbanism, E. 8612, Tokyo, December, 1986. p. 11.
13Ibid. p. 10.
14Sky, A., Sousa, E., Stone, M., Wines, J. (SITE). SITE Architecture as Art, Academy Editions, London, 1980. p. 14.
15Ibid. p. 14.
16The rejection of Modernism by the public along these lines has been put forward and developed extensively by Charles Jencks in various texts. In particular, see: Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post Modern Architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1977.
17This argument was first put forward by Robert Venturi. See: Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York, 1966.
18Sky, A., Sousa, E., Stone, M., Wines, J. (SITE). SITE Architecture as Art, Ibid. p. 25.
19Ibid. p. 24.
The architecture of Diller and Scofidio: The screen and surveillance
Das Experiment. 2001
Oliver Hirschbiegel
Producer: Typhoon Films. (Germany).
Das Experiment was the directorial debut of one of Germany’s up-and-coming directors, Oliver Hirschbiegel, who later went on to direct films including The Invasion, Five Minutes from Heaven and the Hollywood success, Downfall. Hirschbiegel’s introduction to film came from his background in painting and graphic arts and, as a result, his work often has a quirky visual feel. He studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, directed his first film in 1986, a TV movie called Das Go! Projekt, and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director in 2001 with Das Experiment. Taking the events surrounding the Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971,1 as its starting point, Das Experiment is a psychological portrayal of the power of socially determined roles to suppress and/or augment personal psychological tendencies. It shows the human potential for violence, depicts our fall into subservience, portrays the use of humiliation in human relations and gives us an insight into power struggles between conflicting personalities. It is, by its very nature, a representation of the human psyche under pressure.2
Using the Stanford Experiment as its basic template, the film documents a prison simulation in which members of the public take on the roles of prisoners and guards in a two-week case study. Just as in the reality of the Stanford Experiment, the volunteers in Das Experiment do not know whether they will be guards or prisoners, they are told they will be isolated from the outside world for two weeks, and that, once assigned their roles, violence is prohibited. The prisoners are also assigned numbers and are referred to by that number, the aim being to heighten the sense of alienation that is central to the roles they play. In addition, all the protagonists of the experiment are relatively young men.3 Although seriously criticised, on both moral and professional grounds, the “results” of the Stanford Experiment were claimed by its lead psychologist Philip Zimbardo to prove his hypothesis, that is, we take on social roles and modes of behaviour that are, in many cases, stronger and more dominating than personal character traits. This is precisely the message Hirschbiegel repeats, albeit through nuancing it in his portrayal of two of the film’s principal protagonists: Tarek, prisoner number 77, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, and prisoner number 38, played by Christian Berkel, an undercover journalist and member of the German armed forces, respectively.
In this sense, both the real experiment and the film version of it bring up ideas found in the work of Jean Paul Sartre some decades before; particularly, the idea central to Being and Nothingness, that our engagement with socially determined roles is often a way of “avoiding responsibility”.4 Perhaps the more obvious theoretical reference made by the film is to the ideas of Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish, 1975, offers his “archaeological-like” analysis of the changes to the penal system at the beginning of the 19th century. Foucault’s principal argument is that the shift from public execution and torture to “gentle punishment”, and finally to the prison system, was not so much a result of an enlightened age, but rather the result of a shift in emphasis in the tactics of control and power; the imposition of discipline being seen as more effective than punishment.5 One of the key aspects of this was “observation”; a characteristic that was to take very literal form in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, with its central concern for the concept of total observation (Fig. 1).6 Being constantly observed, obliged to follow strict and all-encompassing rules and denied all freedom of action, it was expected that the architecture of the prison would help indoctrinate prisoners into appropriate forms of behaviour. As identified by Foucault, it became a model for military buildings, schools, hospitals and workhouses, all of which were engaged in the development of “docile bodies”.7
Applied on a wider social scale, the creation of “docile bodies” through observation and the imposition of strict behavioural rules were seen as a perfect social system for the creation of a docile majority that would work in factories, fight in wars, toil in the fields, vote (or not) according to convention, and generally behave in accordance with the desires of the ruling classes. The “genius” of Bentham’s idea, however, was not in its physical layout per se, but rather the psychological effects it was able to induce. In the Panopticon, control does not have to be direct, it is simply “implied”; prisoners would never know whether they were actually being watched or not and that they would, in consequence, practically discipline themselves, as the possibility of being seen is a sufficient deterrent to miscreant behaviour.8 By denying the inmates access to this knowledge and keeping them constantly “under the threat of surveillance”, this revolutionary piece of architecture became a metaphor that was used by Foucault to describe the implicit forms of control practiced by the contemporary state upon its members; a metaphor that remains in common usage today, particularly in the context of buildings and urban environments monitored by CCTV.9
All of these issues are dealt with in Das Experiment, which, in addition to documenting the psychological effects of the role-playing experiment, reveals multiple and complex aspects about observation and its influence on both human behaviour and, to an extent, architecture. One could argue that in Das Experiment we are witness to a five-way game of surveillance: the normal filming of scenes in which we, the audience, observe the action on screen; the observations of the scientific team who monitor both the guards and prisoners through CCTV; the physical and CCTV surveillance of prisoners by guards; the “psychological observations” carried out on the participants before the experiment that we see in video interviews; and the black-and-white images from the hidden camera smuggled into the prison by Tarek, the film’s anti-hero and agent provocateur. Here, the centrally designed Panopticon, has been replaced by a multi-layered video monitoring system.10 The effects on behaviour of this level of surveillance are literal. The experiment team become complacently reliant on “complete technological coverage”; the prisoners speak in hushed voices, sneak messages to one another and hide from nothing but a camera; whilst the guards, knowing they too are observed in given locations, adapt their behaviour as necessary depending on the space.
Figure 1: Bentham’s Panopticon.
Set in an institutional office building, the film shows us various architectural layers; the offices of the building itself, its underground service spaces, the false walls and ceilings of the mock-up prison and the interstitial spaces behind its fake construction. Designed for filmic observation at a meta-level, Das Experiment shows the “onstage spaces” of the set and its “backstage” artificiality. This complex and layered presentation of the space is multiplied even further by the forms of filmic observation at play. Using different film stock, standard 35mm film, CCTV video footage and black-and-white hidden camera footage
, we get a complex visual mix; the CCTV footage often gives us oblique angles, or overhead shots, and is generally interlaced with footage from other CCTV cameras. The footage filmed from Tarek’s hidden camera, located somewhere in his eye glasses, creates the effect of a moving camera that is sometimes jerky in its movements and quick to change its angle of view. Similarly, the standard 35mm footage often employs wide angle lenses, distorting pans and zooms and a number of other unusual movement techniques (Figs. 2–3). The result of intermingling the set’s intricate arrangement of spaces (that at one point Hirschbiegel reveals in a physical model) with this visually rich cinematographic tapestry is a complex spatio-visual web that is characteristic of his work. Multiplying our reading of the space, it echoes some of the hybrid filmic and architectural projects of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.
Set up in 1979, the studio of Diller and Scofidio joined forces with Charles Renfro as a partner in 2004 and have begun to move away from early provocative video installations and performance art projects to focus more exclusively on “standard” architectural projects; albeit projects in which visioning technologies still have a significant role to play.11 One example of their more experimental engagement with architecture and film was their 1998 exhibition Para-Site at MOMA, New York. For this piece, Diller and Scofidio placed video surveillance cameras in three distinct locations, including the entrance of the gallery, and linked them to real-time projectors in the display spaces inside. The piece had a very literal political or social message regarding the level of surveillance in contemporary societies, but also raised questions regarding our reliance on the camera and the conversion of real everyday actions into objects of art or entertainment. Here, simple, mundane and unintended actions were automatically associated with art, and the everyday activity of CCTV surveillance is turned into the artistic act of creation. More importantly in the context of this essay, our engagement with physical space became mediated and blurred as sites of action dislocated but reunified through the lens and the screen.12
The Architecture of the Screen Page 3
