"Give me a Gun and i will make all buildings move"

**Manifesto**

Architecture is in many ways the complete opposite to the ephemeral nature of cinema, but what in architecture is perceived as static by its material properties reveals itself to be just as temporal in its spatial values. We often think of time as something that architecture is to overcome, and forget how intimately linked it is to space. Albert Einstein proved this in his theory of relativity, and Siegfried Gideon exemplified these notions in his book Space, time and architecture. By recognizing the inherent nature of movement in space, we are confronted with cinema as a field that deals with the very nature of architecture.

In the realm of the moving image, film can teach us to fully experience movement in architecture, to witness moving landscapes and be moved by them. To understand the kinetic essence of space, whilst learning to actively document what we unconsciously experience every time we mentally walk through a map or a floor plan, while observing it in the two dimensions.

What would happen if architecture students were to start a studio semester with a movie camera at hand?

Walking through an environment holding a camera demands a different degree of engagement, a bodily presence on site, a full awareness of one’s subjective and lively sensitive observation.

Introducing architecture students to the methodology of film can be a way to address and tackle the abstraction that the usual architectural representation provides us. Recognising the social context through temporal engagement establishes an intimate proximity to the physical environment, beyond architectural contemplation.

Our territories and project sites are polytropic and affected by multiscalar phaenomena: the design process requires an immersive exploration into the context, and the reversion of the common planning paradigm, or the top-down juxtaposition of global designs over local histories, a process described by Walter Mignolo in relation to the links between territorial exploitation and the colonial mindset.

Given the present state of ongoing environmental, and ideological crisis, we cannot help but get involved and engaged in systemic change in architecture.

In the words of Timothy Morton, “there are no ideological twists and bends to carry away our physical and philosophical waste into some illusory beyond.”

Among the first steps into ecological awareness in architecture is the acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of landscapes and their metabolisms, and the continuous physiological metamorphosis of the cities where we are called to intervene. Construction, durability, maintenance, decay; permanence, the interim, the transitory.

With its unique synthesis of time within space, film has long been deployed as a medium to detect and document the ephemeral state of cities and landscapes in transition, or simply in movement.

The History of film and architecture

FILMMAKERS ARCHITECTS

A number of times filmmakers deliberately became witnesses of a changing environment, documenting cities and societies as they were permanently transforming.

Today, we only experience those cities that don’t exist anymore through their films, and yet they are real and rooted in our urban imagery and in the collective memory of modern times.

These films captured not only the formal character of cities and landscape, but especially targeted, more or less directly, the social issues and inherent conflicts, narrating the life taking place in the constructed landscape.

The theoretical module of the filming workshop was aimed at acquainting the students with such episodes in film history, urban témoinages from filmmakers-architects, who intertwined urban subplots to their narration and deployed cinema as a critical tool to society and the built environment.

“To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city. It is there that cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and the entire town with a mythical atmosphere. That is where it is truly gripping.”

Jean Baudrillard, America, 1989

So, Jean Baudrillard poetically phrases in America: the cinematic essence of cities has become a fundamental aspect of modern iconography. Such thought was formulated during years where architectural theorists and filmmakers shared common interests and were notably mutually influenced.

During the 1970s, American metropolises were the scene of a rich and interdisciplinary discourse on the cinematic experience of artificial landscapes. The city in motion described by Denise Scott-Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas from 1972 was lyrically depicted in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Los Angeles in Zabriskie Point from 1970.

Film critic Graham Cairns remarkably describes how Antonioni portrayed Baudrillard’s consumer society through the visual cacophony of signals and commercials, where boundaries between buildings and scenographies blur. Zabriskie Point provides an immersive experience into what Scott-Brown, Venturi and Izenour named the architecture of the “decorated shed,” this whilst in movement and from the driver’s perspective, dwelling the vehicular landscape.

A frame from the film taken from the protagonist’s car cabin starkly resembles a photograph featured in Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and John Myer’s The View from the Road. The groundbreaking work published in 1963 also meant to include film as a strategy for urban thinking.