The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  10Gelenter, Mark. The Sources of Architectural Form, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995. p. 145.

  11Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque, Reaktion Books, London, 2000. p. 33.

  12Bernini’s church is oval in plan, with a series of smaller chapels and recessed spaces running around its perimeter. Its floor is covered in patterns and a central mural, whilst the interior of its dome is an exuberant gold plated array of recesses and sculptures. Its circular plan may present the visitor with a symbolic centre but it only serves to set the eye running around, up and over the decorated and coloured surfaces of the building in much the way described by Gelenter. For a detailed examination of his architecture, see: Marder, Tod and Martin, Joseph. Bernini: And the Art of Architecture, Abbeville Press, New York, 1998.

  13Borromini’s San Calro alle Quattro Fontane is “spatially” complex. Its central oval plan is overlaid with other contrasting geometric shapes that turn the floor layout into an intricate series of shapes. The same principal of complex geometric overlaying is applied to the building in section, resulting in a spatially complex form broken down into a series of secondary spaces. It is this “spatial complexity” that initiates the movement of the eye and thus demonstrates Harbison’s arguments. For a general overview of Borromini and this project, see: Argan, Giulio Carlo. Borromini, Sansoni, Milan, 1996.

  Sigfreid Giedion, Rem Koolhaas and the fragmentary architecture of the city

  Run Lola Run. 1998

  Tom Tywker

  Producer: X Filme Creative Pool. (Germany).

  Run Lola Run is a film about love and the power of will. It is a film about coincidence and about chance, but most of all it is a film about how spaces and events exist and occur in time. It is also a film about Berlin. Written and directed by Tom Twyker in 1998, it won 26 prizes, including the Audience Prize at the Sundance Festival, Best Film at the Seattle International Film Festival and seven different prizes at the German Film Awards. It has since become a cult classic. Starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni, it offers a high-octane, goal-focused form of dérive through the streets of the German capital in which everything revolves around an incredibly simple narrative objective: Lola needs to find 100,000 marks and get it to Manni on the other side of the city in twenty minutes. Narratively, it could not be simpler or more conventional. It has a conflict that has to be resolved and everything that follows on screen is directly related to the resolution of that conflict. It becomes a race against time that we are symbolically reminded of by the repeated insertion of clock images as Lola runs through the streets of Berlin. This extreme narrative focus is made even sharper than normal by a filmic structure that breaks down the story into three twenty-minute variations of the same events.1 As a result, it offers three short films, each of which is resolved in a different way.

  With story time reduced to twenty minutes, there is very little opportunity to develop subplots or allow rambling scenes and discussions that would generally permit characterisation to be padded out. Nevertheless, Twyker finds ways around this and is able to make those twenty minutes function narratively in much the same way that a full-length feature film would. For example, he uses the photo flash-forward sequences in which possible subplots of different characters are condensed into a series of seconds2 and we have the flashbacks to Lola and Manni engaged in semi-metaphysical, semi-emotional conversations that allow their fears, hopes and aspirations to be revealed explicitly.3 In addition, we get various moments of dramatic intensity through which Twyker uses to layer characterisation and move the storyline forward quickly. An example of this is the argument scene between Lola and her father in which he decides to leave his wife, tell Lola that she is not actually his daughter and ruin her chances of saving Manni by refusing to give her money; narrative and character information that arrives in a matter of seconds.

  Thus, despite the temporal limitations imposed by the film’s structure, Run Lola Run is read narratively in very conventional ways. Each twenty-minute segment follows Lola as she runs along more or less the same geographical path across the city on three successive occasions; each trip functioning like another game on a video console in which the protagonist makes another attempt at achieving her goal. It is prevented from becoming repetitive by ensuring that the repeated events are subtly changed, and thus fall slightly out of sync with each other in each successive attempt. The result of these dislocations of times, spaces and events is a series of slightly different encounters between the film’s protagonists and the spaces they inhabit.4 These events cascade into a series of subsequently altered encounters that, in turn, explode the number of narrative variations possible within the framework of the individual subplots. It is a tour de force in the exploration of narrative and plot structure that revolves around momentary connections of time, space and events that are easily recognisable as a daily occurrence, albeit without the tension of the film’s drama.

  The fragmentary nature of the narrative and plot game created by all of this is emphasised by filming the same places in each three segments from very different angles and by using various filming techniques: dolly filming, hand-held shooting and crane shots, for example. This cinematic combination of techniques multiplies perspectives by changing view points within the context of a single journey and simultaneously varies the aesthetic feel of each sequence. The disjunction that occurs through this sub-fragmentation is further emphasised by the speed and quantity of the editing. The multiple views produced through repetition and the use of more than one camera being jumbled at such a speed that the final effect can appear dizzying. The visual tempo this sets up is matched by the underlying soundtrack which again emphasises tension and disjunction. It is a combination of techno-like tracks that sets up a repetitive and seemingly relentless forward drive to the events.5

  Breaking up and disjointing all of this even more is the combination of various types of film footage, such as black and white for flashbacks, photographic stills for flash-forwards, video for scenes without the protagonists, standard 35mm film sock when they do appear, and animation for the opening shots of each of the three stories (Figs. 1–3). In combination with the “three game structure”6 of the film, these techniques underline the film’s gaming culture references by calling upon a variety of visual tropes not commonly associated with mainstream cinema. Structurally and cinematographically, Run Lola Run is a complex collage of events and images in which time and space jump around in apparently random patterns. Its cinematographic and structural characteristics allow the director to replay actions and emphasise minute differences between them. They allow him to emphasise the disruption of our sequential understanding of events and to introduce the idea of parallel realities, or at least parallel alternatives to courses of action. It is a film whose techniques permit an examination of the nature of time, space and events and the relationship between them.

  All of these spatio-temporal and cinematic experimentations are of course physically located in a very definite site, the city of Berlin. That city is, however, also caught up in the narrative and filmic disjunctions that operate throughout Run Lola Run. The physical places across which we see the protagonist literally run are, in reality, impossible to link in a continuous twenty-minute route. Just as the narrative and its protagonists build up their own impossible fragmented and repeated stories, so too does the city. Directly paralleling the film’s narrative, it rejects its real topography and becomes a “filmic simultaneous city” in which time and space implode into a geographical urban montage. Run Lola Run is not only aesthetically and narratively daring it reworks the city through the formal possibilities of the cinematic medium. In this regard, it engages with a long architectural-cinematic tradition, the City Symphony. Given its focus on the city of Berlin, the example of that tradition most obviously brought to mind is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin – Symphony of a Great City, 1928, the most famous cinematic examination of the German capital to date.

  Figures 1�
��3: Multiple scenes cut in multiple formats.

  Although Ruttmann came from a purely abstract filmic background, the team he worked with on his 1928 film would go on to work on some internationally renowned commercial successes.7 Ruttmann himself, however, remained firmly in the more abstract camp with both Berlin – Symphony of a Great City and his later collaborations with Leni Riefenstahl,8 being cinematic experimentations in the visual, narrative, temporal and spatial possibilities of the new medium. His 1928 masterpiece is a “documentation” of the city, its space-time relationships and the lives of “everyday people”.9 Focused on life in Berlin during the course of a “typical day”, it essentially follows the ebbs and flows of the city for a single twenty-four-hour period that is arranged in five “acts”; each one foregrounding the multiplicity of events, spaces and times that characterise the modern urban experience. It takes the viewer from the early hours of the morning as the city wakes, through the activities of the day and ends with scenes of the city’s social life in the evening.10

  Despite its ordered structure however, Berlin – Symphony of a Great City fragments its presentation of space and time within its clearly defined segments. It is filmed from various viewpoints, is full of dynamically composed shots, is edited to produce graphic matches or deliberate graphic disjunctions and employs a number of transitional techniques.11 Sometimes the camera is mounted on top of buildings, at other times it is located on the ground and, notably, is often carried on cars, trains and trams so as to continually emphasise movement (Fig. 4). Indeed, mechanised transport becomes a form of leitmotiv that continually appears in each of the film’s five acts. In both its use of Berlin and in its aesthetic of conflicting cinematic tropes, it represents a form of historical precedent that Twyker’s film picks up and modifies at the end of the twentieth century.

  Central to these similarities between Run Lola Run and Berlin – Symphony of a Great City are two themes that have been key issues in architectural theory throughout the twentieth century; the city and the notion of architecture as an experience premised on a simultaneous space-time relationship. The year Ruttmann’s film was released, 1928, saw the first International CIAM conference in La Sarraz, and thus marked the point at which modern architecture addressed the question of the city face-on.12 A key figure at the 1928 conference was Sigfreid Giedion, whose first book, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, was published that same year. Part historical document, and part eulogy for modernism, it was a book that foregrounded the space-time argument as a key concept in the understanding of modern architecture.13 This was to become his modus operandi in the years to come, and with the publication of Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition, 1941, it was not only presented as a key question in modernism but was also given a historical foundation.

  Tracing out the evolution of the city from the Renaissance to the twentieth century through an “operative historical approach”,14 Giedion argues that the development of the city reflects an evolution in notions of space and time. The culmination of this development is read as the conflation, juxtaposition and simultaneity of space and time in the contemporary architectural and urban “experience”.15 Nowhere is this more evident than in Giedion’s description of the Rockefeller Centre, New York, which he proposes as a form of “precedent” for urban development in the contemporary city of the first half of the twentieth century. A conglomeration of fourteen buildings in the heart of Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and Forty-Eighth and Fifty-First Streets, he describes the Rockefeller Centre as “cutting out a new form in New York’s checkerboard grid”. Similar to a Mondrian painting in its repeated use of similar elements, he also identifies that “seen in plan, nothing is revealed of its dynamic form and the dynamic sensation it produces on the eye”.

  As one moves around the complex however, he suggests that it optically begins to explode; “its three largest structures rise in different directions and to different heights. They cannot be grasped from any single position or embraced in any single view. There becomes apparent, a many-sidedness in these simple and enormous slabs. From these well calculated masses one becomes aware of a new fantastic element inherent in the space-time conception of our period”. The nature of the architecture, its urban scale and its asymmetrical arrangement of buildings turn the Rockefeller Centre into an example of modern urban architecture, which he says “can only be comprehended in terms of space and time analogous to what has been achieved in modern scientific research as well as in modern painting”.16 This space-time analogy, that can be summed up in one word, “simultaneity”, is aesthetically reinforced in Giedion’s presentation of the Rockefeller Centre in the photographic collage format.17 Artificially manipulating his presentation of this urban complex, Giedion’s collage underlines his central argument of a combined, conflated, superimposed and simultaneous notion of space and time (Fig. 5).

  Figure 4: Berlin – Symphony of a Great City: multiple cutting in opening sequence.

  Figure 5: Photographic montage of Rockerfeller Center: Sigfreid Giedion.

  Beginning his engagement with these ideas in 1928, Giedion’s space-time architecture found its cinematic brethren in Berlin – Symphony of a Great City, a film that also fragmented, conflated and juxtaposed spaces and times into an on-screen visual collage. In reading them as analogous and related we find an example of a mutual set of interests emerging in both architecture and film in the early twentieth century. These interests were theoretical on the one hand and aesthetic on the other. They were also social. The theory was, of course, based on the twentieth century space-time concept explored by Giedion throughout his career, and particularly in his 1941 text. The aesthetic concerns they shared revolved around the formation of a new fragmentary visual effect, whilst, socially, they both picked up on the question of the city and modern urban life.

  When considered in this context, if we read Run Lola Run as a contemporary reworking of Ruttmann’s film, albeit in a more commercial and narrative form, we are inevitably led to ask whether this film too has a contemporary architectural counterpart. Using the criteria of theoretical, aesthetic and architectural-social concerns, a number of possibilities come to mind: Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Morphosis and other architects and studios generally associated with Deconstruction. However, it is also possible to consider Run Lola Run alongside the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA in a similar vein. Koolhaas first came to notoriety with his 1978 publication Delerious New York: a Retrospective Manifesto. Taking on the city dealt with by Giedion in his description of the Rockefeller Centre, it develops variations on the arguments of simultaneity and the conflation of time, space and events that are central to Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition.

  Whilst Giedion concentrated on the modern urban experience as one of conflated space and time, and thus “simultaneity” in a primarily optical sense, Koolhaas mines a somewhat different strand of this theme. In Koolhaas’ reading, the density of New York is such that single buildings become home to multiple activities: the skyscraper easily being an office, a gym, a restaurant and a hotel all in one, for example.18 A corollary of this folding of events and spaces is an analogous conflation of times. Events normally associated with the morning, afternoon and evening merge in a single space in an unregulated time sequence. Life in the modern city, as epitomised by New York, is a complex, overlaid menagerie of events, activities, times and locations. Furthermore, it is also a site of continual change. The speed of technological and urban change at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries is such that, Koolhaas argues, it has become simply impossible to conceive of the type of pre-planned approach to urban design of the CIAM period. Echoing comments found in the later editions of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition,19 he proposes an approach to urban design that is based on facilitating continual evolution and multiple redevelopment.20

  These themes were evident in some of Ko
olhaas’ earliest projects such as his proposal for the Parc de La Villette competition, Paris, 1984. Eventually won by Koolhaas’ former teacher, Bernard Tschumi, the Koolhaas proposal for La Villette employed the Deconstructive approach of his tutor. Described as a strategy rather than a design proposal, the scheme presented by Koolhaas envisaged dividing the site into strips of spaces and activities that would be overlaid and juxtaposed to each other. Use was to be indeterminate.21 The architectural “objects” envisaged as scattered around the site would not define function or use a priori. They thus became a series of independent architectural forms similarly intended to juxtapose themselves with one another and facilitate change and adaptability for the overall ensemble. Central to this conflation of events and spaces is the question of scale, a theme he dealt with in Delirious New York and would return to some twenty years later in S, M, L, XL, co-authored with Brue Mau. In Delirious New York, he suggested that as buildings become ever larger any sense of disparate spaces for distinct events become irrelevant; multiple locations and activities coalesce in a unified entity, the mega structure or skyscraper. In S, M, L, XL, he argues that a subtext to the ever-increasing scale of building permitted by a range of technological developments is quite simply “fuck context”.22

  “Fucking” context, however, is not limited to the imposition of ever larger forms on the existing urban fabrics of modern cities; it is something that frees the architectural object from stylistic limitations, a notion perfectly in tune with the Deconstructive and tendencies of his former tutor and his own earlier projects. Amongst some of the projects that display his parlance fragmentary architectural form, material juxtaposition and spatial fragmentation are the CCTV building, Beijing; Casa da Musica, Porto; the Seoul National University Museum of the Arts and the Seattle Public Library, to name but a few of the more emblematic (Fig. 6).23 Smaller projects displaying similar tendencies, as well as the idea of overlaying multiple and conflicting activities in a single space, are his projects for Prada in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles between 1999 and 2004; projects in which OMA also experimented with the use of various technologies and new construction and interior materials.24