ARCHITECTURE | MONTAGE

INCORPORATING THE TOOLS OF THE FILMMAKER IN THE DESIGN PROCESS OF THE ARCHITECT
MICHAEL HARTWELL | EPFL ENAC MASTER THESIS | JANUARY 2013

Under the supervision of :

Prof. George Abou Jaoud
Prof. Urs Egg
Teresa Cheung Sze Wing
Font:
Myriad Pro Condensed

EPFL ENAC SAR MA3 / January 2013

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ARCHITECTURE | MONTAGE
INCORPORATING THE TOOLS OF THE FILMMAKER IN THE DESIGN PROCESS OF THE ARCHITECT

MANIFESTO
EXCERPTS ON MONTAGE
THE SITE
THE FILM
REFERENCES

MANIFESTO

Luis Buuel, Salvador Dal, Un Chien Andalou

One day, you decide to study architecture. You learn to draw plans, sections and
axonometrics; make models; discover structure, materials, and even composition.
Still, you feel that there is something missing in much of what you read and learn.
You are aware that architecture uses sophisticated means of notation - elevation,
axonometrics, perspective views, and so on. But you soon realize that they dont tell you
anything about sound, smell, touch, or the movement of bodies through space. (...)
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Bernard Tschumi / Architecture Concepts

In an age of facilitated access to knowledge and mean on any given field of practice, one
cannot overlook the benefits of learning from other disciplines that could potentially
enrich ones own field of practice.
The following thesis aims to investigate on a mean that might become a trend in the
following years of architectural design.
The world of the image, widely studied in the fields of photography, illustration,
painting, sculpture, design, filmmaking, etc... plays a significant role in architectural
design, thus bringing the architect into studying these fields.
Why Filmmaking?
Film, Video, Cinema, Motion Picture is deeply impregnated in our culture more than
ever before; consumed worldwide, it is also becoming extremely accessible to the mass
population. With portable devices capable of recording at a 1080p full HD resolution,
anybody could potentially embrace the world of filmmaking.
Currently used in architecture as a simple recording or rendering tool, one can easily
speculate that filmmaking could very well join the design tools and most importantly,
the design process of the architect in the near future...

The cameraman, intervenes with what we see in a way which a painting can never do. It
directs the eye towards a specific place and a specific story; at the same time it is radical
and revolutionary it is also totalitarian. It guides us to a particular side of a story and leaves
other parts out. It dulls our perception towards the work of art and introduces distraction
as a mode of reception. (...)
Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The
painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon
himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye
grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.The spectators process
of association in the view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden
change. (...)
How does the cameraman compare with the painter? The painter maintains in his work
a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a
tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one,
that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new
law.
Walter Benjamin / The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Space without time is a picture.

Olafur Eliasson

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The world of filmmaking encompassed a wide variety of disciplines:

Scriptwriting, storyboarding, set design, location scouting, camera operating, camera
movement, framing, editing, compositing, post-production, lighting, directing,
producing, acting, ...
One could find conceptual opportunities for architecture in any of these fields thus being
exposed to an infinite amount of possibilities and confusion. To avoid getting lost, an
attempt was made to pull out elements that are true to filmmaking, less likely to be
shared/confused with other practices of the image such as photography.
As a result, the thesis research was narrowed down to the aspect of MONTAGE, widely
explored in the works of Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard and the
associations that Bernard Tschumi made between Architecture and Filmmaking.
However, the thesis does not reformulate these works, but is a catalogue of excerpts and
quotes that are to be considered and further investigated in a subsequent architectural
project.
The main focus of ARCHITECTURE | MONTAGE is the making of an 18min film of
documentary nature in which film technique and theory of MONTAGE are explored and
put into practice as well as a cinematographic experimentation and documentation of a
chosen site of intervention.

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EXCERPTS ON MONTAGE

Sergei Eisenstein

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Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art reception of which is
consummated by the collectivity in a state of distraction. (...) Architecture is an art form
received passively.
Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin was aware of the constant complication of seeing as the modern world
we live in creates a continuous layer of complexity beyond immediate comprehension.
Architecture is loosing the battle of the image in a media culture that is becoming more
distracted and promoting more passivity. (...)
The film camera could provide a new way of thinking about and looking at the city; a
way to critically apprehend what seems to have become culturally invisible; to achieve an
understanding of self in relation to others in the social space we inhabit.
The camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and
isolations, its extensions and accelerations.
Fragmentation becomes a way of understanding the modern world, montage becomes its
essential tool.
Sergei Eisenstein believed that the introduction of discontinuity in the montage would force
the spectator to engage an internal work of interpretation and thinking, thus propelling
him into active thinking.
Aaron Taylor Harvey / Cinematequetonics

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Dialectical Montage
Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965

I. DIALECTICAL MONTAGE
Sergei Eisenstein, who defined the term MONATGE and was its most passionate defender,
practiced what is known as dialectical montage. The shots appear to collide forcing a
viewer to engage their powers of reason to create the necessary connections that bring
meaning. A film can present a fragmented data set with confidence, as the human mind
has no choice but to construct a whole.
In Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin said that talkies and
architecture were both art forms received passively, but Eisenstein clearly believed that this
passivity could be disrupted through the perpetual interjection of discontinuous imagery
forcing the spectator to mount each successive shot.
Montage is not simply the technique of cutting shots together, it is a dynamic system for
the expression of ideas.
Aaron Taylor Harvey / Cinematequetonics

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Continuity Editing
Ferris Buelers Day Off, John Hughes, 1985

II. CONTINUITY EDITING

The editing is not the central concern of the film. Editing is actually used against itself, as
an attempt to make the spectator ignore the cuts and dissolve the awareness of the edit; to
serve a seamless whole, a hyper logical filmic totality: more real than actual reality.
Aaron Taylor Harvey / Cinematequetonics

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Montage in the Mise-En-Scne

Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

III. MISE-EN-SCENE
One can easily compare Mise-En-Scne with theatre; the filmmaker attempts to
contain everything in one single frame and shot without any cuts.
Rear Window is an architectural expression of a cinematic idea that challenges cinematic
troupes by presenting a rich montage within the mise en scene; segmenting the action of
different players but presenting them all at once. Hitchcock creates new connections across
seemingly unconnected actions for both the viewer and the protagonist. By drastically
reducing the realm of experience and then articulating every moment of it, Hitchcock
creates a hermetic experiential space that contains disparate data but still seems coherent.
Aaron Taylor Harvey / Cinematequetonics

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Amir Soltani
Soft Cinematic Framework

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Montage is conflict
Sergei Eisensteins five forms of montage
Metric - The rate of the cuts are given by a determined length of shots no matter what is
happening within the image.
Rhythmic - The cutting rate is based upon the rhythm of movement/action that occurs
within the shot.
Tonal - The emotional tone of the shot determines when a cut occurs.
Overtonal - The overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal
montage.
Intellectual - An arrangement of shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.
This meaning does not exist within the individual shots; it only arises when they are
juxtaposed.

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SPACE | EVENT | MOVEMENT

Architectures unique quality is that the means through which it materializes its concepts
are also the means through which it expresses itself visually and socially. (...)
Architectures is linked to events in the same way that the guard is linked to the prisoner, the
policeman to the criminal, the doctor to the patient, order to chaos. This also suggests that
actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions. (...)
Architecture and events constantly transgress each others rules, whether explicitly or
implicitly. These rules, these organized compositions, may be questioned, but they always
remain points of reference. A building is a point of reference for the activities set to negate
it. A theory of architecture is a theory of order threatened by the very use it permits. And
vice versa. (...)
Bodies Violating Space ; First, there is the violence that all individuals inflict on spaces by
their very presence, by their intrusion into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a
building may be a delicate act, but it violates the balance of a precisely ordered geometry.
(Do architectural photographs ever include runners, fighters, lovers?)
Architecture, then, is only an organism passively engaged in constant intercourse with
users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought.
Few regimes would survive if architects were to program every single movement of
individual and society in a kind of ballet mcanique of architecture.
Bernard Tschumi / Architecture Concepts
Bernard Tschumi
Advertisements for Architecture

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The world of cinema was the first to introduce discontinuity a segmented world in which
each fragment maintains its own independence, thereby permitting a multiplicity of
combinations.
At one point in The Golem, the street is filled with a cheering crowd; later on, its strewn
with dead bodies. Its not quite the same street in the two versions.
The screenplay in the film begins to seem like an architectural program, describing a set
of activities and their relationships. If the site of the film is the street, then its space is
defined by what happens in it. You begin to realize that, as an architect, you will be writing
programmatic screenplays of sorts, as if anticipating potential events.
If you take a cathedral and project Hollywood movies in it, the building ceases to function
as a cathedral. So architecture does not exist without a program, and its presence changes
with the differing nature of the programs.
Space, Event, Movement; The relationship that gives meaning to architecture. Abstracted
from a user or a context, a building has no meaning.
There is no such thing as a neutral space. Architecture does not exist without something
that happens in it. Our perception of architecture depends on the activities that take place
inside it. The space is transformed by events.
Bernard Tschumi / Architecture Concepts

Paul Wegener
The Golem, 1920

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28

The temporality of the Transcripts inevitably suggest the analogy of film. Beyond a
common twentieth-century sensibility, both share a frame-by-frame technique, the
isolation of frozen bits of action. In both, spaces are not only composed, but also developed
from shot to shot so that the final meaning of each shot depends on its context.
The relationship of one frame to the next is indispensable insofar as no analysis of any one
frame can accurately reveal how the space was handled altogether. 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 depend merely on a single frame,
but on a succession of frames or spaces. (...)
We begin with a set of discrete frames (five real architectural configurations, five real
movements, five real events) and combine them in a set of autonomous and linear
sequences (both transformational and programmatic), each with its own internal logic
and rational rules.
(the skater skates on the skating rink)
Only at the end are they all superimposed and then de-constructed into something
altogether different.
(the quarterback tangoes on the skating rink)
Bernard Tschumi / Manhattan Transcripts

Bernard Tschumi
The Manhattan Transcripts: MT4 color plate

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Bernard Tschumi
La Villette, Axon

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Themes from The Manhattan Transcripts

Definition
Limit
Condition
Disjunction
Classification
Event
Space
Movement
Relation
Indifference
Reciprocity
Conflict
Notation
Movement Notation
Event Notation
Articulation
Frames
Sequence
Transformation
Device
Combination
Program
Narrative
Deconstruction
Reality
Photography
Cinema
Sensation
Violence
Pleasure / Madness
Bernard Tschumi
La Villette, Folie Diagram

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Kuleshov Effect, 1910-1920

The insertion of any additional space within a spacial sequence can change the meaning
of the sequence as well as its impact on the experiencing subject (as in the noted Kuleshov
experiment, where the same shot of the actors impassive face is introduced into to a
variety of situations, and the audience reads different expressions in each successive
juxtaposition).
Bernard Tschumi / Manhattan Transcripts

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THE SITE

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Sebeillon is a district of industrial character, located in the historically ancient railway

strip of Lausanne. It was chosen as a shooting location for the film because of its
intriguing position; right at the THRESHOLD between the soon-to-be urbanised western
end of the Flon valley (Sevelin) and the Malley districts further west. At a large scale,
Sebeillon stands n-between the cities of Renens and Lausanne.
There is a certain no-mans land atmosphere to be felt on site, both visually and
programmatically; a consequence of the lack of urban planning and interventions in the
past decades. Some clear traces of the 1940s heavy railway activities are still present,
such as tracks and docking platforms.
Aside from its in-between character, Sebeillon witnesses a large number of events as
Tschumi qualified them: abandoned as well as main rail-tracks, a metal waste centre,
oversized parking surfaces, the Sarassin industrial hangar (protected architecture),
high density social housings, an isolated butchery among the tracks, a frequently
congestionned main road, a high level of prostitution along the main road and in the
social housings. In Sevelin, the neighboring, district industrial lofts and ateliers, creative
agencies, two professional schools of 650 students each, a theatre, a concert hall, an
isolated bar, an art exhibition centre, a skate-park.
During the next decade, Lausanne will be launching a large scale urban program on
the whole industrial strip. At the heart of the program stands a massive infrastructural
project that will reintroduce the tramway line in the heart of Lausanne as it once was in
the 1940s. One of the lines will run along the industrial strip from Renens to Lausanne,
and could potentially trigger urban activity along the strip including Sebeillon.
ARCHITECTURE | MONTAGE seeks opportunities in the present and future conditions of
Sebeillon to investigate on the excerpted themes on conflicting events and montage.
Bel-Air
Lausanne, 1940

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THE FILM

Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova,

Man with a Movie Camera

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Personal Gear
DSLR Camera, Tripod, Dolly Slider

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The film is a practical application of the previous studied excerpts on montage. Using
close and wide angles, with still, hand-held, panning or tracking shots, one discovers
many events, conditions and atmospheres through the camera lens.
Further attention has been given to the rhythm of the film. Some shots are arranged in
a group of equal lengths (metric montage), others shot lengths depend on their content
(rythmic montage), another shot reaches almost 5min in lengh and explores the MiseEn-Scne technique.
Following the collision theories of Bernard Tschumi, an attempt was made to collide
shots of opposing nature in their visual and audio content:
The powerful machines crushing tones of metal | The long and painful shot of the worker
scraping slowly the dirt off his truck
The social housing and future constructions | The parking covered in debris of used
condoms
The noisy roads and car wash facilities | The hollow atmosphere and echoes of the old
hangar
The active city centre of Lausanne | The silent landscape of abandoned rail-tracks
The crowded skate-park | The crowded butchery

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REFERENCES

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ALEKAN, Henri, Des Lumires et des Ombres, Editions du Collectionneur, 1998

BERGFELDER, Tim, HARRIS, Sue, STREET, Sarah, Film Architecture and the Transnational
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Mller Publishers, 2010
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PDF ARTICLES

BUNDGAARD, Charlotte, Framing Fragmentation The Architect as a Master of Montage

in http://www.changingroles09.nl/uploads/File/Final.Bundgaard.pdf
ETN, Hasan O., Fundamentals of Architactural Design in Comparison to Filmmaking
in http://www.etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12607669/index.pdf
CHAN, ChiuShui, Motion & Architecture
in http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cschan/534/Motion_in_Architecture.pdf
CHATZITSAKYRIS, Panagiotis, The Man With The Movie Camera : An Event-Driven
Approach to Architectural Design
in http://www. dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33034
CHIN, Andrew, Bernard Tschumi - Six Concepts: Excerpt from Architecture and Disjunction
in http://www.famusoa.net/achin/courses/tschumi/6concepts.pdf
EISENSTEIN, Sergei M., Montage and Architecture (CA. 1938)
in http://www.cosmopista.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/eisenstein_montage-andarchitecture.pdf
GILLETTE, David, Sergei Eisenstein and the Montage
in http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~dgillett/ENGL_411/pdf/DP_Chapter_2_selection_I.
pdf
HARRIS, Yolande, Architecture and Motion: Ideas on Fluidity in Sound, Image and Space
in http://www.yolandeharris.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ArchMotion.pdf
HARVEY, Aaron T., Cinmathquetonics: Within the Apperceptive Montage
in http://dl.dropbox.com/u/415948/Cinemathequetonics%20Script.pdf
HERRMANN, Erik W., Collisions in Architecture and Film
in http://www.trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2079&context=utk_
chanhonoproj

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KYOUNG EUN KWONG, Filmic Architecture: On motion perspective in an Architectural

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MASSERA, Carmen A., Architectural representation and experiencing space in film
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ONETO, Paulo D., A Critical Reading of Walter Benjamins The work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction
in http://www.gewebe.com.br/pdf/critical.pdf
PETROVICI, Liliana, Art of Film A Way of Architectural Communication
in http://www.ce.tuiasi.ro/~bipcons/Archive/167.pdf
ROUND, Tony, The Architecture of Blade Runner: Collage and Contradiction in a Vision of
the Future
in http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/faculty_projects/terri/pdf/blade_runner_
rev.pdf
SHOPE, Joshua Loyd, Screening Architecture: Film Theory and Study as Design Method
in http://www.lulu.com/shop/joshua-shope/screening-architecture-film-theory-andstudy-as-design-method/ebook/product-17375773.html
SOLTANI, Amir, Mapping Architectural Appearances, Affects, and Amodality
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SOLTANI, Amir, Panohaptic Interface for Architectural Filmic Improvisaion
in http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_ev09_s9paper3.pdf

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Cover
Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, Man with a Movie Camera