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Abstract
This paper examines Lebbeus Woods’ 1988 project “Underground Berlin” and a corresponding film script coauthored by Woods, in an exploration into affinities between cinematic thinking and architectural imagination. Placing Woods’ professional and theoretical engagement with film within the constellation of discourses regarding film’s relationship with the built environment, this paper posits “Underground Berlin” as a unique example in which architectural representation, cinema, and storytelling come together in the imagination of futures and offer a renewed capacity for architecture to operate politically in the world.
Notes
Notes
1 Sergey Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” Assemblage, no. 10 (December 1, 1989): 116–130.
2 Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture”: 117.
3 Hugo Münsterberg noted the futility of the debate regarding film’s origins in 1916, but his view of the debate still circled around optical and photographic predecessors: “It is arbitrary to say where the development of the moving pictures began and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead. What invention marked the beginning? Was it the first device to introduce movement into the pictures on a screen? Or did the development begin with the first photographing of various phases of moving objects? Or did it start with the first presentation of successive pictures at such a speed that the impression of movement resulted? Or was the birthday of the new art when the experimenters for the first time succeeded in projecting such rapidly passing pictures on a wall?” Hugo Münsterberg quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 117.
4 “Painting has remained incapable of fixing the total representation of a phenomenon in its full visual multidimensionality. (There have been numberless attempts to do this.) Only the film camera has solved the problem of doing this on a flat surface, but its undoubted ancestor in this capability is—architecture.” Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture”: 117.
5 Here Eisenstein speaks of a different piece of architecture—Bernini’s Baldachin in St. Peter and its columns. Still, the analysis continuous the theoretical move connecting architecture and montage: “In themselves, the pictures, the phases, the elements of the whole are innocent and indecipherable. The blow is struck only when the elements are juxtaposed into a sequential image.” Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture”: 128.
6 Bruno mentions Kracauer and Benjamin as two key figures in the formation of a type of film criticism that stemmed and focused on the relationship between film and urban culture. Giuliana Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric,” in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 15–16.
7 Several documentary films celebrating the rise of the modern metropolis were created during the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Walter Rutman’s Berlin: Symphony for a Great City, André Sauvage’s Études sur Paris, or Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolf Rex Lustig’s São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole.
8 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2007), 17.
9 Paul Virilio, L’ insécurité du territoire : essai (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 14 (my translation).
10 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary 40, no. 4 (October 1, 1965).
11 These, Sontag claims, served as unique tools in such a process, reflecting “world-wide anxieties” as well as serving “to allay them.” Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 42.
12 Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 44.
13 Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 44.
14 “Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the locus of values because we experience them, rather than people, as the sources of power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts. They stand for different values, they are potent, they are what gets destroyed, and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the repair of the damaged environment.” Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 45.
15 For a contemporary reading on the motivations behind the International Building Competition (IBA) projects, see Esra Akcan, Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship, and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018).
16 See “The Case against Restoration” and “The Case Against Erasure,” in Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture = Rat i Arhitektura, Pamphlet Architecture No. 15 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 10.
17 It is worth noting here that in this text, as in many others, Woods refers to architecture in an expansive, and to a degree, ambiguous manner. Namely, when Woods speaks of “architecture” it is not meant to signify the formalized, professional, and institutional discipline of architecture, but rather an encompassing idea of the architectural act, be it a building, an architectural drawing, or model of an unbuilt work, or even a text. In this regard, in this essay I often use the term “architecture” in the same manner, with the hope to not only follow Woods’ ambiguity, but also to suggest that it is precisely this ambiguity that allows Woods to speak of his own work in ways that are at times nebulous. Woods, War and Architecture, 36.
18 Woods held an exhibition in the Aedes Architecture Gallery in Berlin in 1987 titled CENTRECITY: The Unified Urban Field, in which he exhibited drawings of an imaginary, placeless city.
19 Woods published several blog posts about films and filmmakers, including Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me, Deadly, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light as well as Federico Fellini’s drawings in his The Book of Dreams. See Lebbeus Woods, Slow Manifesto: Lebbeus Woods Blog, ed. Clare Jacobson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015).
20 Aaron Betsky, “Lebbeus Woods: Materialist Experiments and Experiences,” in Terra Nova: 1988–1991, A + U August 1991 Extra Edition, eds. Lebbeus Woods and Toshio Nakamura (Tokyo: a + u Publishing Co, 1991): 11.
21 Betsky, “Lebbeus Woods.”
22 Lebbeus Woods, “MAGIC MARKER,” Lebbeus Woods Blog, March 31, 2011, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/magic-marker/.
23 Woods, “MAGIC MARKER.”
24 Woods, “MAGIC MARKER.”
25 Woods, “MAGIC MARKER.”
26 Woods, “MAGIC MARKER.”
27 Lebbeus Woods, Anarchitecture: Architecture Is a Political Act, Architectural Monographs 22 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
28 Woods, Anarchitecture, 13.
29 Woods simply stated in the following sentence: “I was wrong.” Woods, Anarchitecture, 13.
30 Woods, Anarchitecture, 50.
31 For a full catalogue of the exhibition and other commissioned works see Kristin Feireiss, ed., Berlin, Denkmal Oder Denkmodell?: Architektonische Entwurfe Fur Den Aufbruch in Das 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: W. Ernst, 1988).
32 Woods, Anarchitecture, 50.
33 Lebbeus Woods, “UNDERGROUND BERLIN: The Film Treatment,” Lebbeus Woods Blog, September 15, 2009, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/underground-berlin-the-film-treatment/.
34 Woods, “UNDERGROUND BERLIN.”
35 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, 2nd edition (London: Academy Editions, 1994).
36 Preston Scott Cohen, “Successive Architecture,” Log, no. 32 (October 1, 2014): 153–163.
37 Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6–7.
38 Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
39 Woods, Anarchitecture, 50.
40 One of Woods’ more known texts is a short manifesto titled “War and Architecture,” which opens a pamphlet with the same name and in which he evokes Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the related title of Marshall Berman’s book: “I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then ‘melt into air’” (my emphasis). See Woods, War and Architecture.
41 Woods, Anarchitecture, 50
42 Woods, Anarchitecture, 50.
43 Woods’ library contains several books authored by Virilio including the 1989 study War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, and Pure War. Moreover, in 2002 Woods was commissioned to create an installation as part of the exhibition Ce qui arrive (Unknown Quantity), which explored the history of accidents and was curated by Paul Virilio in the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Woods’ installation, titled “The Fall,” was designed to imagine and capture one of the exhibition halls as in a moment of collapse. See Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (London; New York: Thames & Hudson and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2003) and Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and the Fall (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). In War and Cinema Virilio charts the historical and conceptual relationship between modern practices of war and the use of cinematic vision as part of war effort, effectively transforming the battlefield into a field of contested vision. See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London; New York: Verso, 2009).
44 Lebbeus Woods and Toshio Nakamura, eds., Terra Nova: 1988–1991, A + U August 1991 Extra Edition (Tokyo: a + u Publishing Co, 1991), 32–61.
45 Bruno writes about the material affect of film and suggests that this dual ‘function’ of film, to both move and move its spectators, relates etymologically to “the ancient Greek word kinema, which means both motion and emotion.” As such, film operates in both material and affective spheres. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 145.
46 For more on the history of narrative and architecture in the twentieth century see Nigel Coates, Narrative Architecture (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2012).
47 Coates, Narrative Architecture, 18
48 The authors continue the declaration and state that “even once it is has been built, it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what happens inside and outside, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated and transformed beyond recognition.” Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun and I’ll Move all Buildings: An ANT’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture; Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 80.
49 Latour has focused in recent years on reassessing the contemporary role of social sciences, particularly sociology, by challenging both the notion and composition of society and what constitutes a science. For further reading see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
50 Latour’s main assertion is that the notion of the ‘social’ must be expanded as to include various actants—humans and nonhumans, inanimate objects, institutions, technologies, etc.—into what defines a society. The ‘social’ for Latour encompasses any set of relations between such actants and is the very thing that sociology should take up as its object of investigation—namely, not the things that are related to one another but the relations themselves. “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations,” in Latour, Reassembling the Social, 1–21.
51 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 63.
52 I refer here to the architects collected by Phillip Johnson and Mark Wigley in the 1988 MoMA exhibit Deconstructivist Architecture: Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhas, and Daniel Libeskind. See Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988). The already mentioned work of Bernard Tschumi, for instance, explored the relationship between event-space and architectural representation and asked, by referencing the visual transcripts made by Sergei Eisenstein, to deconstruct and recombine architectural space into a fragmented, fractured, and dismembered whole. The architectural drawings of Daniel Libeskind, on the other hand, have been considered through a variety of lenses, and have been noted by historian Robin Evans as moving beyond any familiar concept of architectural signification to the point that “they cannot be fully understood even by their author.” Robin Evans, “In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind,” AA Files no. 6 (May, 1984): 89–96. It is worth noting also the work of Greg Lynn which challenges the “dominant” cinematic model in architectural thinking in favor of an animation of architectural form. Employing digital computation in mathematical explorations, Lynn asked to animate inner dynamics of architectural formation and generate novel forms. Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
53 Bazin writes that “perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement,” and Epstein states respectively that “to the elements of perspective employed in drawing, the cinema adds a new perspective in time.” Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 160; Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 316.
54 Latour and Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun,” 80.
55 “But when you draw a building in the perspective space invented in the Renaissance (and made more mobile but not radically different by computer assisted design), you begin to believe that when dealing with static objects, Euclidian space is a realist description… This should not be the case, since the 3D-CAD rendering of a project is so utterly unrealistic. Where do you place the angry clients and their sometimes conflicting demands? Where do you insert the legal and city planning constraints? Where do you locate the budgeting and the different budget options?” Latour and Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun,” 81–82.
56 Latour and Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun,” 88–89.
57 Balsom also notes that etymologically the word projection “comes from the Latin proiectio, ‘to throw’.” Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 43.
58 Brian Henderson, “Two Types of Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 3 (April 1, 1971): 38.
59 Nelson Goodman, “Words, Works, Worlds,” in Erkenntnis 9 (1975): 73.
60 Karl Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 154.
61 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 38.
62 Woods, War and Architecture.
63 Crary, Techniques.
64 Vertov speaks of the camera eye as one that exceeds the powers of the human eye, and suggests a hybridization of camera and human. “I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blueprints and diagrams of different kinds… I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility.” Dziga Vertov, Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 15.
65 “How does the camera operator compare with the painter? In answer to this, it will be helpful to consider the concept of the operator as it is familiar to us from surgery. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician […] Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 35.
66 “Marey would only have had to put his photographic paper rolls into a projection apparatus driven by clockwork, but he did not, and he thus missed the chance of becoming Lumiere or technical light itself.” Friedrich A. Kittler, Optical Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009), 160.
67 For more on the history and development of chronophotography and projection by Marey and Muybridge see the chapter “Film” in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 115–182.
68 Kittler, Optical Media.
69 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 168.
70 See for instance Donghee Shin, “Empathy and Embodied Experience in Virtual Environment: To What Extent Can Virtual Reality Stimulate Empathy and Embodied Experience?” in Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 78 (January, 2018): 64–73.
71 This should not suggest that gaming or virtual world-building exists outside the realm of politics. As Alexander Galloway notes, there is a political potential in examining the ways in which interactions and gameplay take place and are represented. See for instance Alexander Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia,” CTheory—1000 Days of Theory (2006), https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14501/5342. For more on the growing interest in world-building see Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. World-Builders on World-Building: An Exploration of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2020).
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Eliyahu Keller
Eliyahu Keller is an architect and a Ph.D. candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the MIT Department of Architecture. He is the coeditor of the 46th volume of the department’s peer-reviewed journal Thresholds, published by the MIT Press. Eliyahu holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Ariel University in Israel and a Master in Design Studies with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research investigates the relationships between the rise of nuclear weapons, apocalyptic thinking, and visionary architectural production during the Cold War in the United States and the Soviet Union.