In 1928, architecture historian Siegfried Giedion declared that only film can make the new architecture intelligible. For him, only a dynamic medium such as the cinema could capture the simultaneities and blurred boundaries of the contemporary city and communicate the new worldview across cultural and ethnic borders. Similarly, Le Corbusier argued that the silent film, as a purely visual medium, passes over frontiers, just like the aeroplane.
In recent years, the early modernists’ enthusiasm for the cinema has not only been matched but actually surpassed, with architects increasingly replacing the tectonic with the image in their effort to express the changeability of the built environment and to capture the non-representational, event-like, fluid character of the city as a generic form liberated from identity and resisting any sociological explanations.
With contributions by: Marcelino Santos; Henry Bacon; Robert Jan van Pelt; Doug Graf; Stijn Colpaert; Jean-Louis Rivard; Audrey Yue; M. Christine Boyer; Felicity Collins; Roy Armes; Gareth Griffiths; Dörte Kuhlmann; Terri Meyer Boake; Kari Jormakka; Arturo Silva and Djamel Zeniti