More prosaically however, we have also seen that the impact of television on the work of the architect in the sporting context is most evident in the accommodation of the media facilities required for broadcast, either external or, ever more commonly today, internal. Fundamental to the stadia of today and tomorrow, the necessity of accommodating the requirements of the media was heavily criticised in the Munich stadium as potentially ruining the building as envisaged by the architect. Since then, it could be argued that the discrepancies highlighted by Philip Drew in 1972 have ceased to be a factor in the design of major sporting venues. As they have become increasingly hybrid constructions in themselves, their architects have become increasingly aware of sports stadium design as a hybrid activity: part architecture, part spectacle, part television stage set.
What such a realisation eventually leads to, for the future of stadium design of course remains unknown. It also remains open to multiple other influences that could take it along totally unexpected paths. However, these observations on the relationship between the design of sports architecture and the televised event lead us to a consideration of our second theme: how the technologies of television, as offered to the spectators at home, are being adapted and offered to the spectators inside the stadium themselves. This, we suggest, may become a fundamental question: it may be the nature of spectatorship and, by extension, vision and perception that come into question.
The spectator of the future may be obliged to engage with real physical events through the medium of their own eye, whilst simultaneously watching events through the highly developed technologies of television. Consequently, they may well be processing two distinct types of visual information: the mediated images of television replete with its complex range of visual tropes, and the “real” image formed in real time on the retina of the in situ spectator. In this scenario, the spectators inside modern stadia are on the brink of a totally new sporting experience; an experience in which the difference between being at home and being in the stadium is blurred, an experience in which the distinction between the real and the mediated ceases to be noticeable or indeed important, and a scenario in which the nature of “real” sight merges with the mediated experience of the televisual. In this context we see that the future for the architecture of sport, as well as for the experience of the spectator, is one that on multiple levels is symbiotic, blurred and integrated. In short, the future of architecture, televisual technologies and human sight is hybrid.
Notes
1Larson, James, F and Soo Park, Heung. Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics, Westview Press, Oxford, 1993. p. 2.
2Sutter, Keith. “The Best Olympics Money Can Buy”. World Today. Vol. 56, No. 8/9, August/September, 2000. p. 40.
3Sheard, Rod. Stadia: A Design Development Guide (4th edition), Architectural Press, London, 2007. p. 1.
4Rustin, Michael. “Sport, Spectacle and Society; Understanding the Olympics”. In: G. Poytner (ed), Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London, Ashgate, London, 2009. p. 3.
5Hart, Jeffrey. “Olympics Used for Soviet Propaganda”. Human Events. Vol. 37, No. 48, November 26, 1977. p. 9.
6Close, Paul, Askew, David and Xu Xin. The Beijing Olympiad: The Political Economy of a Sporting Mega Event, Routledge, London, 2007. p. 145.
7Guttmann, Allen. “The Cold War and the Olympics”. International Journal. Vol. 43, No. 4, Autumn, 1988. p. 554.
8Official IOC page. http://www.olympic.org/olympism-in-action.
9Slack, Trevor and Parent, Milena. Understanding Sport Organisations – Second Edition: The Application of Organization Theory, Human Kinetics, New York, 2005. p. 194.
10Cooper-Chen, Anne (ed). Global Entertainment Media: Content, Audiences, Issues, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London, 2005. p. 231.
11Whannel, G. “The Television Spectacular”. In: A. Thomlinson and G. Whannel (eds), Five Ring Circus: Money, Power and Politics at the Olympic Games, Pluto Press, Michigan, 1984. p. 30–45.
12Adelman, Melvin, L. “‘The Nazi Olympics’ by Richard D. Mandell” (Book Review). Journal of Social History. Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall 1972. p. 113.
13Whannel, G. “The Television Spectacular”. Ibid. p. 35.
14Real, Michael R. and Mechikoff, Robert A. “Deep Fan: Mythic Identification, Technology, and Advertising in Spectator Sports”. Sociology of Sport Journal. Vol. 9. 1992. p. 326.
15Brookes, Rod. “The Olympic Games”. In: G. Creeber (ed), Fifty Key Television Programmes, Arnold Publishers, Bath, 2004. p. 149–153.
16Kitchen, Paul. “Financing the Games”. In: J. Gold and Margaret Gold (ed), Olympic Cities; City Agendas, Planning and the World Games, 1896–2012, Routledge, London, 2007. p. 105–107.
17Larson, James, F. and Soo Park, Heung. Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics, Ibid. p. 5.
18Sheard, Rod. Sports Architecture, Spon Press, London, 2001. p. xvi.
19Román, Noelia. “Atenas cambia de cara”. El País Seminal. No. 1.430. 22, February, 2004. p. 42.
20Rabinovitch, Simon. “Beijing Games to be Costliest, but no Debt Legacy”. Reuters. August 5, 2008.
21Clarke, John, M. “How Much Will the London Olympics Cost? Too Much”. Business Sports Money. www.Forbes.com. March 28, 2012.
22Román, Noelia. “Atenas cambia de cara”. Ibid. p. 43.
23Waxman, Henry. “International Olympic Committee Reform Act”. www.Waxman.house.gov. April 2, 1999.
24Larson, James, F. and Soo Park, Heung. Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics, Ibid. p. 67.
25Real, Michael R. and Mechikoff, Robert A. “Deep Fan: Mythic Identification, Technology, and Advertising in Spectator Sports”. Ibid. p. 339.
26Slack, Trevor and Parent, Milena. Understanding Sport Organisations – Second Edition: The Application of Organization Theory, Ibid. p. 17.
27Louw, Eric. “Editorial Introduction”. Journal of International Communication. Vol. 2, No. 1, Routledge, London, 1995. p. 2.
28Magnay, Jacquelin. “Estimates That There Will Be 11 Million Visitors to London 2012 Are Well Wide of the Mark”. Blogs.telegraph.uk. January 31, 2001.
29Louw, Eric. “Editorial Introduction”. Ibid. p. 2.
30Bruent, Ferran. “The Economy of the Barcelona Olympic Games”. In: G. Poytner (ed), Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London, Ashgate, London, 2009. p. 97–120.
31Garcia, N., Rivenburg, N.K. and de Morgas Spá, M. “Television and the Construction of Identity”. Centre d´Estudis Olímpics i de l´Esport (UAB), Barcelona, 1995. p. 7.
32Louw, Eric. “Editorial Introduction”. Ibid. p. 3.
33Sandvoss, Cornal. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television, and Globalisation, Routledge, London, 2003. p. 69.
34Treceño, Jaime G. “Botella promocionará el patrimonio cultural con el Real Madrid como reclamo”. Economía, El Mundo. www.elmundo.es. April 24, 2012.
35Sheard, Rod. Stadia: A Design and Development Guide, Ibid. p. 23–24.
36Sheard, Rod. Sports Architecture, Ibid. p. 13.
37Valdano, Jorge. El Miedo Escénico y Otras Hierbas, Editores Aguilar, Buenos Aires, 2003. p. 191.
38Drew, Philip. Frei Otto:Form and Structure, Crosby, Lockwood, Staples, London, 1976. p. 38.
39Sheard, Rod. Stadia: A Design and Development Guide, Ibid. p. 11.
40Nerdinger, Winfreid. Frei Otto Complete Works: Lightweight Construction and Natural Design, Birkhäuser, Berlin, 2005. p. 269.
41Drew, Philip. Frei Otto: Form and Structure, Ibid. p. 38.
42Ibid. p. 8.
43Ibid. p. 38.
44Ibid. p. 39.
45Real, Michael R. and Mechikoff, Robert A. “Deep Fan: Mythic Identification, Technology, and Advertising in Spectator Sports”. Ibid. p. 337.
46Sheard, Rod. Stadia: A Design and Development Guide, Ibid. p. 23.
47Kruse, Holly. “Multimedia Use in a Sport Setting: Communication Technologies at Off-Track Betting Facilities”. Sociolo
gy of Sport Journal. Vol. 27, 2010. p. 415.
48Sheard, Rod. Sports Architecture, Ibid. p. 15.
49Real, Michael R and Mechikoff, Robert A. “Deep Fan: Mythic Identification, Technology, and Advertising in Spectator Sports”. Ibid. p. 323.
50Barclay, Patrick and Powell, Kenneth. Wembley Stadium; Venue of Legends, Prestel, London, 2007. p. 125.
51Sheard, Rod. Stadia: A Design and Development Guide, Ibid. p. 149.
52Cuito, Aurora. Sports Facilities, Loft Publications, Barcelona, 2005. p. 167.
53O’Reilly, Norm and Rahinel, Ryan. “Forecasting the Importance of Media Technology in Sport: The Case of the Televised Ice Hockey Product in Canada”. International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship. Ontario. October 2006. p. 84.
54Booth, Robert. “Wrap Round Video Screen Proposed for London Stadium”. The Guardian: Sport. http://www.guardian.co.uk. August 23, 2008.
55Perlman, Ian. “Look of the Games”. Landscape Architecture Magazine. February, 2001. p. 83.
56Toyne, Paul. “London 2012 – Winning the Olympic “Green” Medal”. In: G. Poytner (ed), Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London, Ashgate, London, 2009. p. 231–242.
57Bisson, Mark. “Olympic Stadium Legacy Deal Collapses; UK Athletics Says Boost for London 2012 Bid”. http://www.aroundtherings.com. November 10, 2011.
58Sheard, Rod. Sports Architecture, Ibid. p. 15.
59Sandvoss, Cornal. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalisation, Ibid. p. 147.
60Ibid. p. 137.
61Ibid. p. 148.
62Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1994. p. 13.
63Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Verso, London, 1997. p. 89.
64Sandvoss, Cornal. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalisation, Ibid. p. 137.
65Guttmann, A. Sports Spectators, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986. p. 127.
66Morrey, Douglas and Dauncey, Hugh. “Quiet Contradictions of Celebrity Zinedine Zidane, Image, Sound, Silence and Fury”. International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 11(3), SAGE Publications, London, 2008. p. 312.
67Simonyi, Sonja and Van Tomme, Niels. “Real-Time Spectacles: Two Artworks and the Representation of Soccer”. Afterimage: The Journal of Arts, Culture and Media Criticism. New York. May/June 2009. p. 6.
68Morrey, Douglas and Dauncey, Hugh. “Quiet Contradictions of Celebrity Zinedine Zidane, Image, Sound, Silence and Fury”. Ibid. p. 310.
69Bradshaw, Peter. “Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait”. Film Review. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film. September 29, 2006.
70Simonyi, Sonja and Van Tomme, Niels. “Real-Time Spectacles: Two Artworks and the Representation of Soccer”. Ibid. p. 6.
71Dargis, Manohla. “Portrait of the Artist as a Global Soccer Star”. New York Times: Culture. Film Review. October 23, 2008. p. 10.
72O’Reilly, Norm and Rahinel, Ryan. “Forecasting the Importance of Media Technology in Sport: The Case of the Televised Ice Hockey Product in Canada”. Ibid. p. 92.
73Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, Ibid. p. 43.
74Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Power Publications, Sydney, 1995. p. 29–61.
75Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle and Other Films, Rebel Press, London, 1992. p. 59–117.
76Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia, SAGE Publications, London, 2000. p. 21.
77Sandvoss, Cornal. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television, and Globalisation, Ibid. p. 144.
78Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia, Ibid. p. 2.
79Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine, Ibid. p. 13.
80Ruttle, J. “The Symbiotic Relationship Between Television and the Olympic Movement”. In: R. Jackson & T. McPhail (eds), The Olympic Movement and the Mass Media: Past, Present, and Future Issues, University of Calgary, Calgary, 1989. p. 513.
Cinematic movement in the work of Le Corbusier and Sergei Eisenstein
Introduction: Painting and architecture in Purist France
As identified by Beatriz Colomina, Le Corbusier was an architect who documented everything he did.1 In addition, he is an architect who has been extensively examined and documented by others.2 Consequently, when we re-engage with this gigantic figure of the Modern Movement, the plethora of material available can be overwhelming. In the specific context of interest here, is a cinematic examination of the Villa Savoye project, 1928–1931, the material available is however more scarce. In a secondary sense, it was identified in the writings of Sigfreid Gidieon who, in Space, Time and Architecture, as long ago as 1941, referred to it as a project “conceived in motion”.3 It also makes a brief appearance in Guiliana Bruno’s more recent work, Atlas of Emotion, 2002, in which she discusses the architectural promenade in the context of film.4 In Michael Raeborn and Victoria Wilson’s book Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century, 1987, it also plays a cameo role through references to the architect’s tendency to frame views and construct storyboards of movement.5 More explicitly, in Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR, Jean-Luis Cohen mentions the architect’s interest in film through his admiration of Sergei Eisenstein.6
In journal articles, this cinematic reading of Le Corbusier is also threaded through pieces such as Davide Deriu’s “Montage and Modern Architecture: Giedion’s Implicit Manifesto”7; Açalya Kiyak’s Describing the Ineffable: Le Corbusier, Le Poème Electronique and Montage8; and Guilia Bruno’s “Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image”, in which she develops ideas found in Atlas of Emotion.9 It is in the writings of Beatriz Colomina, however, that we find the most extensive analysis of Le Corbusier from this cinematic perspective. In Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 1996, Colomina offers media-wide readings of Le Corbusier’s work through which she threads a cinematic argument.10 In Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture, she goes further and begins to draw direct reference to analogies between his architecture, film sequences and his relationship to film and television in general.11
Picking up these strands of investigation, this essay underlines a number of issues found in the existing material on Le Corbusier, his interest in “framed views” and the idea of “architecture as movement” for example, and places them alongside features and ideas found in the work of Sergei Eisenstein. In doing so, we suggest that Eisenstein’s spatio-temporal reordering of filmic events through montage, his approach to shots as individually framed images, and his interest in the sequence of the “cinematic path” may be filmic concepts whose relationship with the architecture of Le Corbusier is worthy of further examination. In order to draw out these arguments and thus lay the groundwork for a more detailed examination of Le Corbusier as an architect inspired by film and Sergei Eisenstein as a filmmaker influenced by architecture, we will first of all return to Le Corbusier’s work in painting in the early 1920s; a work which, as with other periods of his career, has been extensively documented.12
The key historical figure at this juncture in Le Corbusier’s work was of course Ozenfant, through whom Le Corbusier was introduced to painting and with whom he would develop and promote the “Purist aesthetic of the new age”.13 In his descriptions of Le Corbusier’s first faltering steps as a painter, Geoffrey Baker examines two of his earliest works, La chiminée and Nature morte avec libre, verre et pie, both from 1918. Describing these as “open canvas spaces with a limited number of objects”, he suggests that their isolation of “object types” create static un-engaging compositions.14 This characteristic remained, he suggests, until his development of the traces regulateurs which would produce tighter, more geometrically controlled, intricate and complex compositions in 1919.15
In establishing the source of this compositional breakthrough in Le Corbusier’s painting, Baker goes on to hint at the influence this would have on his architecture, and in doing so, echoes a number of other theorists: notably, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton. For Rowe, Le Corbusier’s architecture of this period was definable in explicitly Purist terms,16 as it was f
or Frampton who described the Villa La Roche, designed 1922, as “the three dimensional equivalent of a Purist canvas”.17 For all three writers, Le Corbusier’s work in architecture was clearly linked to his work as a painter, and clearly illustrates a cross-disciplinary tendency actively seeking to draw inspiration from external sources.
Going beyond the identification of a formal assimilation of dynamic painterly compositions into architectural plans, sections and elevations however, Baker more directly expounds an optical effect of motion found in Le Corbusier’s mature paintings of the period. Focusing on what he calls Le Corbuiser’s “compositional tour de force”, Nature morte à la pile d’assiettes, 1920, he builds up a description of how the eye engages with its composition in terms of a complex, but always controlled, optical game of circular motion.18
A horizontally composed piece, Nature morte à la pile d’assiettes, revolves around a central point, the canvas being divided horizontally and vertically. It is composed of “images of two guitars, a stack of cream plates (which dominate the piece visually), an opened book standing on edge, two bottles, two pipes and small cylinder, presumably a glass” (Fig. 1). Baker describes how the plates…“draw the eye as the main focus of the composition”, how from this, the eye catches the edge of the guitars and is led onwards…“moving upwards to the right along the curves of the guitars, down the green container, across the top of the book, and back to the plates”. Furthermore…“at the centre of the rotation is the green top of a cylinder, picked out in white, around which two pipes are locked in confirmation of the rotary intention”.19
In this reading, Baker turns his understanding of Le Corbusier’s painting from a compositionally dynamic set of elements controlled in a complex, overlaid and ordered composition, into an understanding of how the eye engages with visual phenomenon. In so doing, he applies a strictly formal interpretation that echoes with arguments put forward by Christopher Green. With regard to Purism, Green describes how the eye scanning a Purist painting “shifts viewpoint in order to move from one ‘essential’ aspect of an object to another, from say, the circular base of a glass to its tapering profile, to its circular top…translating it (the composition) into a formal theme”.20 Both Baker and Green interpret these works as optical games that naturally lead the eye across the canvas surface; something that Le Corbusier and Ozenfant themselves alluded to in their description of painting as responding to “the unchanging physiological structure of the eye, mind and body in response to form, line and colour”.21 Just as he does with regard to the compositional characteristics of Le Corbusier’s paintings, Baker draws a parallel between this focus on “perceptual movement” and Le Corbusier’s architecture;22 in this case, through the architectural promenade.
The Architecture of the Screen Page 25
