SEMINAR PAPER ON

COMPARISON BETWEEN FILM AND ARCHITECTURE

BY

GARIMA NEUPANE

2075/BArch/011

SUBMITTED IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE FOR THE

PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR IN ARCHITECTURE

TO

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE
THAPATHALI CAMPUS
IOE, TRIBHUWAN UNIVERSITY

AUGUST, 2023
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Comparison between Architecture and Film

Abstract
Film and architecture are most influential artforms which not only concern themselves
with art but also technicalities. There are ways in which architectural and cinematic space
are homogeneous in the realm of imagination, movement, experience and practice. They
are both concerned with creating existential spaces that create a certain sense. The way
we experience both art forms is also similar since both artforms produces similar effects
in our psyche. Both artforms concern themselves with motion in one viewer moves to
navigate their story, in other the movement of camera moves its narrative. Both
professions require collaboration of different fields but both share a singular narrative.
With so many apparent differences, film and architecture share similarities in the way
they are experienced.
Keywords: architecture, film, experiential space, motion, imagination.

Introduction
Architecture and film are two art forms that share a symbiotic relationship. This
relationship is grounded in the notion of experiential, lived, and existential space
(Pallasmaa, 2023). They are both considered art forms that allow individuals to express
their creativity and convey messages through visual and spatial experiences. Both
architecture and film create an interaction between the event, person, and setting, which
is the starting point of architecture (Pallasmaa, 2023). While they differ in their medium
and execution, they share several similarities and play important roles in shaping our
understanding of theworld.
Architecture is a mix of art, technology, and structure, and it is often recognized as cultural
icons and works of art (Context, 2022). It is about the creation of spaces that serve
functional purposes and also express cultural, social, and aesthetic values. Architects work
with various physical elements such as form, scale, materials, light, and space to create
structures that not only fulfill functional needs but also evoke emotions, provoke thoughts,
and contribute to the overall environment.
Similarly, film is a visual storytelling medium that integrates moving images, sound, and
other elements to create a narrative or convey an artistic expression. Filmmakers use
camera techniques, editing, sound design, music, acting, etc. to capture and manipulate
reality, presenting stories and notions in a compelling and immersive manner. Films have
the power to make audiences travel to different times, places, and emotional states, while
also reflecting and commenting on various aspects of society. They can be used to explore
the relationship between architecture and the human experience. The interaction between
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cinema and architecture is a complex, often multifaceted dialogue between both disciplines
(Baratto, 2022). The all complexities of the relationship between both art forms is to create
an experiential narrative grounded in reality.
The main objective of the study is to establish film and architecture as two different art
forms which are in some way interconnected and interwoven to each other. This research
also aims to explore the relationship between the two worlds not just in their physical
relationship, but more as associated in values in a metaphoric way. It also studies the ways
cinema creates spaces in the mind, reflecting thus the inherent ephemeral architecture of
human mind, thought and emotion. This research will try to attend both to the richness of
strategies for using the moving image to represent the built environment, and how
architecture and urban spaces are cast as protagonists in both cinema and in real life.

Similarities and differences between film and architecture

“Film's undoubted ancestor is architecture.”

Sergei M. Eisenstein.
Architecture started approximately 10000 years ago when homo sapiens stopped dwelling
in caves and stared constructing places to live in themselves; and has ever since been an
integral part of human nature and development. Films, on the other hand, are a newer
medium of art form and has been the most influential art form of the 20th and 21st century.
Both, architecture and film are two art forms that share a close relationship in both their
principles as well as their impact on human life. They both deal with different articulations
of space, frames, and images of life (Rezende, n.d.). While architecture deals with physical
structures and their impact on our built environment, film transports us into imaginative
worlds through the combination of moving images and sound. Both forms of art can
inspire, challenge, and shape our perceptions of the world around us.

Film. Architecture and Space

Cinema is closer to architecture than any other art forms, not solely because of its temporal
and spatial structure, but fundamentally because both architecture and cinema articulate
lived space (Harris, 2003). These two art forms create as well as reflect the essence of
images of life. In the same way that buildings and cities create and cast images of culture
and a specific way of life, cinema highlights the cultural aspect of both the time of its
making and the era that it represents. Both forms of art define the dimensions and essence
of existential space; they both create experiential scenes of life situations (Harris, 2003).
Both space in cinema and space in architecture symbolizes existential space that holds a
cultural narrative of that time.
Art forms of film and architecture define scenes of human interaction, snippets of life and
horizons for understanding the world. Space, both cinematic and architectural, is an
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intricate and artistic balance of psychological and experiential factors. Architecture is not
just about the structure, walls and columns, similarly, film is more than just as montages
of frames on a two dimensional screen. The movies have an equal ability to affect both our
feelings as well as our memories in ways that quality architectural spaces do.
Film and architectural space share a dimension of living, that is, the space of one's lived
experiences. They are about lived space, and the visions of live able places. They are both
alive spaces, and places for living, narrated by motion and always grounded in subjectivity.
Placing itself in-between perceived, conceived and lived space; the spatial arts thus express
the viewer. Film establishes the architectural habitus. It makes a way of building sites, and
building "sets" of dwelling and motion. Perceived by way of habit and touch, cinema and
architecture both leave similar impact on the viewer’s mind.
There is a tangible link between space and desire. Space unleashes human intangible and
subconscious desires. In this scenario, one absorbs, and is absorbed by, moving scenes.
The absorption of subject in the story and sequence of space involves a series of changes.
Providing space for living and lodging sites for reflection of the actual life and human
desires, film and architecture are constantly reinvented by stories of the living. Thus, space
in the cinema is not a rigid solid thing but almost like a fluid substance capable of all sorts
of changes: something which can be portrayed on the screen with the same universality as
we manipulate physical space in our thought, imagination or a dream. It displays the
properties of abstract space but also identifies this abstract space with the reality of world
of our senses. The cinema is capable of demonstrating visually what science has proved
empirically: that the experience of space we obtain through our senses in everyday life has
only an illusory tangibility.

Film. Architecture and Experience

The art forms cinema and architecture are the creators of comprehensive frames of life.
Cinema is close to architecture not just because of its temporal and spatial structure, but
elementally because both architecture and film express lived space. In the same way that
buildings and cities create and preserve images of culture and a particular way of life,
cinema illuminates the cultural archeology of both the time of it making the era that it
depicts. Both forms of art define the dimensions and essence of the existential space; they
both create experiential scenes of life situations. (Pallasmaa J. , 2001). Both worlds of films
and architecture exist beyond the physical realms, in the dimension of mental experiences.
Space is always a combination of external space and inner mental space, actuality and
mental projection.
In experiencing the space, memory and dream, fear and desire, value and meaning, fuse
with the actual perception. Lived space is space that is inseparably joined with the viewer’s
life situation. We do not live separately in material and mental worlds; these experiential
dimensions are fully intertwined. Neither do we live in an objective world. We live in
mental worlds, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past,
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present and future are inseparably intermixed. Lived space resembles the structures of
dream and the unconscious, organized independently of the boundaries of physical space
and time. (Pallasmaa J. , 2001). Houses are built in the world of three dimensions, but lived
space always transcends beyond to a new dimension of experience.
Architecture is the tactile art form. The structures of architecture can be touched, the space
is experienced physically. Whereas the film is not a tactile art form. The film is
communicated not in the tactile realm but in the pure visual realm, which has an integration
of the sounds to the context of the story the film narrates. Imagination is the foundation of
our mental existence and also our way of dealing with stimuli and information. Research
from brain psychologists and physiologists at Harvard university shows that images take
place in the same zones of the brain as visual perceptions, and the former are equally as
real as the latter (Rosslyn, 1996). Thus, with except the absence tactile experience in the
films, the effect of both art forms produces a similar experience in the viewers.
The modes of experiencing architecture and cinema become identical in this mental space,
which wonders without fixed boundaries. Even in the architecture, a mental image is
transferred from the experiential thought of the architect to the mental world of the viewer,
and the material building is just a mediating object. The fact that images of architecture are
tactile and present in the world of 3 dimensions, whereas cinematic images are only an
illusion projected onto the screen, has no fixed significance. Both art forms define frames
of life, situations of human interaction and horizons of understanding the lived world in
the person’s mental picture of the world.

Filmmaker and Architect

The architect and the filmmaker have a lot in common mostly because their professions
require the mixture of courage, determination, and hubris that allow them to translate a
personal vision on an often-unreceptive world. Both practice synthetic arts, where
collaboration and compromise are rules rather than exceptions and where clients have
financial—if not creative—control (Lamster, 2000). Both are not only rooted in the
creative field and expression but in technology, science and economy.
Every film includes frames of architecture. Even if the buildings are not actually shown in
the film, there is the essence of architecture because already the framing of an image
establishes a distinct place. On the other hand, establishing a place is the fundamental task
of architecture; the first task of architecture is to mark man’s place in the world. The
structuring of place, space, situation, scale, illumination, etc., characteristic of architecture
– the framing of human existence- seeps unavoidably into every cinematic expression
(Pallasmaa J. , 2001). Thus, film and architecture have an unavoidable relationship.
With the aid of production designers, art directors, location managers, and other members
of cast and crew, integrate architecture into their movies and set the scenes according the
creative choices. On a functional level, architecture sets a frame which conveys
information about plot and character while contributing to the overall narrative of a movie.
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In more discreet ways, filmmakers can use their cameras to make statements about the
built—or unbuilt—environment, or use that environment to comment metaphorically on
any of a variety of subjects, from the lives of the characters in their films to the nature of
contemporary society (Lamster, 2000). Filmmaker uses architecture as a silent actor in the
frames that transcribes the mood of the movie to the audience.
Architects design and bring to life not only the structures that appear in films but the
structures in which films are played i.e. theaters which is the important infrastructure that
supports the film industry. As arguably the defining art form of the twentieth century, film
has had a profound effect on both the way architects envision their work and the way the
public consumes architecture (Lamster, 2000). Each profession effects one another, and
being the most popular art forms their reflections are time and again seen in both art forms.

Film, Architecture and Motion

"Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives
and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects
of contrast and linkage through which one passes..."
Jean Nouvel
Architecture is staged in the realm of three dimension, observer moves between these
dimensions and feel the architecture shift with this movement. Likewise, cinema gains
movement through its representation in the moving image screen, captured by dynamic
cameras, and retouched through editing and sound. Both share an integral connection with
movement, in a way that movement is the essential way of experiencing them. Movement
changes the viewer’s frame in both art forms; the difference is that, in architecture primarily
the viewer moves and in the cinema the movement is in frames.
Architecture has complex and ambivalent relationship with movement. The material of
architecture - the building - occupies one physical location in space, yet the function of
architecture is characterized by the process with which it contains and directs the
movements of its occupants (Harris, 2003). Architecture is static, it holds its space, and it
doesn’t show the movement itself and thus is an artifact. Its dynamics lies in the process of
process of experiencing the spaces that it creates. One experiences the dynamics of the
architecture when one lives the changing processes and functionality. Dynamics in
architecture also comes from movement of the observer. The forms shift their shapes with
the viewer’s frame. Moreover, the movement in architecture is not only experienced
spatially but also temporally. Architecture, at its best, transports those who experience it
through the realms of space and time.
Painting has remained incapable of fixing the total representation of a phenomenon in its
full visual multidimensionality. Only the film camera has solved the problem of doing full
visual multidimensionality on a flat surface, but its undoubted ancestor in this capability is
architecture (EISENSTEIN, 1938). Dynamics and motion in the film is seen only on the
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bounds of the screen on the movie frames. The viewer is static, and there is absence of any
haptic stimuli. The movement thus exists in cinema, physically in frames of the moving
images and in the minds of the user experiencing the 3 dimensional perception of cinema
from the two dimensional screen. Primarily, the movement is brought about on the screen
with the help of movement of camera. There are two ways to camera movement at the most
primitive level, either the camera moves or the object or space it films moves, or any
combination of these two. It is fair to say that the combination of the sound with the image
in the representation of space in film is one of the most fundamental examples of an audio-
visual discipline and is of primary relevance to creating in a multi-disciplinary format
(Harris, 2003). Film in contrast to architecture is limited in its mobility as the viewer stays
in one location and cannot actually dive into the experience; at least not physically although
mentally. In contrast, architecture can not only be perceived but it also offers a haptic
experience. Therefore, the strong connection between architecture and film results in the
fact that both are greatly dependent on motion, be it perceived, spatial or temporal motion.

Film, Architecture and Imagination

We live in a world in which the experienced, remembered, and imagined, as well as the
past, present, and future are inseparably intermixed. The Place and event, space and mind,
are not outside of each other. They define one another together and holistically combine
into one experience. The world of film allows us to experience this duality perhaps more
clearly as compared to architecture. Film provides a “passage” to another world,
transporting the audience to spaces that perhaps feel more real than the reality. We sink in
to the world it narrates and absorbed by the story, the characters, and the environments and
are transported into an entirely different plane of reality; a place more about psychological
connections than physical ones. Similarly, the architecture also has its power to generate
imaginative worlds through the spaces that provide existential experiences and images
accumulated in the human memories. And it leaves a greater impact when it touches the
core of discarded visions of the past feelings.

Conclusion
Whether real or imaginary there is an undeniable connection between the creation of films
and development of our built environment. The exploration of volumetric space in time,
proposed reality, gaps left for the food of imagination; all these are the similarities the art
forms share. Through the tool of motion in their discipline, both architecture and film
represent a narrative that is based on a lived space and memories of the viewer, such that
it is open to interpretation and imagination. The architecture is more than just a box of
habitat of human and similarly, the films are not only two dimensional montage of images.
Both forms of art transport the one who experiences then with the mental realm of
experience and imagination. Both are the disciplines of collaboration but despite this they
have a uniquely individual holistic character to them that tells a personal narrative, vision
and reflects the notion of individuality through space.
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Acknowledgment
I express my sincerest gratitude to everyone who has provided me valuable guidance,
encouragement, and support, which have played an essential role in shaping this research.

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