surface and flatness in architecture and film
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Robert D. Hermanson, Professor Emeritus College of Architecture and Planning, University of Utah
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Abstract
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Beginning with the Enlightenment human endeavor has shifted from a philosophy based on what Mortimer Adler calls First Order questions to that of the empirical sciences emerging as the dominant mode of inquiry. While Positivism emphasizes the sciences as the only knowledge of reality, other movements have emerged that challenge this authority, among them the movement known as Phenomenology. In contrast to the Positivist emphasis on pure objectivity, Phenomenology strives to address events that appeal directly to our consciousness, our sensorial reading of the world. In doing so it strides multiple disciplines and worlds.
Architecture, a synchronic phenomenon, and film, a diachronic one, find mutual correspondences as a result of the experiential and the sensorial. Beginning as separate disciplines, and with specific notions of perception and space/ time based on their particular technologies, the two disciplines have grown increasingly together. As Juhani Pallasmaa observes:
” These two art forms create and mediate comprehensive images of life. In the same way that buildings and cities create and preserve images of culture and a particular way of life, cinema illuminates the cultural archaeology of both the time of its making and the era that it depicts.” 1
These two cultural expressions as mutually related attributes of spatialness and the experiential, form a part of the present cultural condition. Questions emerge, however. What is surface? Is it the surfaces we see on the film screen that evoke greater depth, literally, but also metaphorically, than even architecture itself? Likewise, what is depth? Is it the architectural expressions of volume ( and meaning ) now compressed onto glass screens and surfaces that seemingly deny its depth? Within this milieu I argue that there exist contradictary conditions redefining the meaning of phenomenology itself 2 as they pertain to the present zeitgeist. Such conditions and interpretations of their meaning form the basis for this paper.
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1 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001).
2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ( New York: HarperOne, 1962).
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Author biography
A graduate of the U. of Minnesota, B. Arch. and the U. of Pennsylvania, M. Arch, a registered architect in the State of Oregon and a recipient of several AIA design awards I have practiced for several years in Minnesota, Utah and Oregon. As a Professor of Architecture at the U. of Utah for 27 years and now Professor Emeritus, my areas of study have included design, theory, and interdisciplinary studies including dance, literature, music and film. I have presented papers at several international and national conferences focusing on interdisciplinary studies, theories of re-presentation, pedagogy, and media theory. An invited visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional del Literal in Santa Fe, Argentina I focused on a pedagogy related to film and architecture as examples of migratory phenomena. I am presently developing studies related to phenomenology and a re-examination of the role of the sublime in architecture.