Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture

Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture aims to explore parallel approaches to the conceptualisation and composition of place, space, time, materiality and narrative in cinematographic and architectural practices. Beyond drawing useful implications for design, the book investigates a range of themes to mobilise a reconsideration of cinema and architecture as non-representational practices. It suggests that films and buildings can be read and designed as assemblages not directed to the formal expression of meaning, but to the framing of strategic and enabling conditions of emergent sense, realised within the tectonic and material conditions of the cinematic and the architectural as such. Succinct analyses of precedents in film, music, painting and architecture are used to foreground tectonic and compositional characteristics related to spatiality, temporality and narrative that are transferable across disciplines and practices. The thematic framework of the book engages theoretical material by Heidegger, Simondon, Deleuze, Nancy, Agamben and Stiegler. Classical modernist and postmodernist films by Dreyer, Antonioni, Hitchcock, Godard, Paradjanov, Tarkovski, Herzog, Lynch and Heneke are analysed side by side with important traditional, modernist and contemporary buildings, including works by Corbusier, Scarpa, Lewerentz, Zumthor and Markli. Illustrated with drawings and photographs by the author, the book should be of interest to practitioners and students of art, design, cinema and the built environment who wish to expand the creative scope and resonance of their work.