Cinematic Aided Design

An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture

François Penz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317526629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues, as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life.

The everyday life is one of the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. However, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.

PART 1
An everyday life approach to architecture

1
THE CASE FOR EVERYDAYNESS

Il y a un siècle, qui aurait cru possible d’étudier avec le plus grand sérieux scientifique les balbutiements de l’enfant ou les rougeurs de l’adolescence ? Ou la forme des maisons ? Dans la mesure où la science de l’homme existe, elle trouve sa matière dans le banal, dans le quotidien. Et c’est elle, la connaissance, qui a frayé la voie à notre conscience. [Who would have thought it possible a century ago that the first hesitant words of infants or the blushes of adolescents – or the shape of houses – would become the objects of serious scientific study? In so far as the science of man exists, it finds its material in the banal, in the everyday. And it is the science of man – knowledge – which has blazed the trail for our consciousness.]

(Lefebvre, 1958, p.146)¹

This first section is essentially concerned with providing an overview of the current position on the everyday that pertains to the world of architecture. However, in doing so I am not attempting to redefine what the everyday is. Rather, I am preparing the ground for what is, I believe, a new approach, that is to study the everyday through the medium of film with a view to provide not only architects, planners, designers, practitioners, but also politicians and decision-makers with a new awareness of the everyday. I suggest concentrating on how spaces are being used and practised by cinema, so the type of everydayness I am interested in is the daily use of our everyday spaces – the streets we use every day, the transport we take routinely to go to work, the workplaces we inhabit – but with an emphasis on the home, houses and dwellings in general. All of those spaces are used, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, in a state of distraction (Benjamin, 2007, p.239), and therefore need to be constantly reassessed. I will therefore start by considering the everyday through my own lens, starting by ‘clearing the ground’, not through a comprehensive review of the field but by highlighting what is here relevant for my hypothesis, a necessary step towards establishing the conceptual basis for this book.

It would be difficult not to start with Henri Lefebvre, who devoted three large volumes to the study of the everyday, spanning over 30 years of his life: Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947, 1961 and 1981). In his 1961 second edition – Critique de la vie quotidienne – Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté [Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday], he states his objective as ‘The object of our study is everyday life, with the idea, or rather the project (the programme), of transforming it’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.296). Paradoxically, while attempting to transform it, Lefebvre found it challenging to define precisely what everyday life is. Indeed a lot of the writing in the three volumes of Critique de la vie quotidienne (hereafter I will abbreviate the title to Critique) is devoted to successive refinement of the definition: ‘How can everyday life be defined? It surrounds us, it besieges us, on all sides and from all directions’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.335), further acknowledging the difficulty of the project.

In one sense there is nothing more simple and more obvious than everyday life. How do people live? The question may be difficult to answer, but that does not make it any the less clear. In another sense, nothing could be more superficial: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another sense nothing could be more profound. It is existence and the ‘lived’, revealed as they are before speculative thought has transcribed them: what must be changed and what is the hardest of all to change.

(Lefebvre, 2014, p.341)

As a result, many of his readers have acknowledged that ‘Lefebvre’s concept of everyday life is elusive, due in part to his intensely dialectical approach and his refusal of any static categorization’ (Berke and Harris, 1997, p.13). Poignantly Lefebvre states that ‘we are moving closer to a detailed and precise definition of everyday life’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.355), but in the last page of the last volume, The Epilogue, he states ‘to finish this conclusion, which in no sense is definitive or conclusive’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.842), thus inferring that the project was indeed open ended. Lefebvre also clearly rejected the idea of establishing a ‘closed system’.² I therefore construe Critique as an ‘open system’ from which we can borrow, pursue, expand and interpret. And by ‘open system’ I mean that there is such a richness of thinking in Critique that it is open to multiple interpretation. Critique operates like a ‘fractal text’: whenever one delves deeper into Lefebvre’s writing, the same problems and complexity keep appearing, but reformulated in different ways.³

Particularly interesting in Lefebvre’s project is the idea that the everyday has clear potential for creative inspiration: ‘it is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved’, which stresses the potential for ‘works of creativity’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.338). There is also a clear sense of optimism that indeed the everyday can contribute to changes: ‘Vague images of the future and man’s prospects are inadequate. These images allow for too many more-or-less technocratic or humanist interpretations. If we are to know and to judge, we must start with a precise criterion and a centre of reference: the everyday’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p.340). I will take this as one of my starting points, that is to say that the everyday concept can be an agent of change and a work of creativity. Critique de la vie quotidienne accompanies this project on many different levels and throughout this book.

Other major influences pertaining to the elaboration of the concept of the everyday have to be acknowledged, as succinctly summarized by Sheringham:⁴

Between 1960 and 1980 the evolving ideas of Lefebvre, Barthes, Perec, and Certeau fed into and drew on each of the others […] and made this a vital period in the emergence of the everyday as a paradigm. But one of the features that does make them different from one another (whilst enhancing the collective power of their contributions) is that these authors emerged from different intellectual traditions […]. In the broadest of terms, Lefebvre can be associated with humanist Marxism, Barthes with Structuralism and its evolution into post-structuralism and post-modernism, Certeau with history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, and Perec with the literary experimentalism of the Oulipo group, inaugurated by Raymond Queneau.

(Sheringham, 2006, p.9)

But aside from Lefebvre, the other towering figure of the everyday who is very prominent in this book is Georges Perec.

Lefebvre and Perec

If Lefebvre is l’incontournable who provides an infinite matrix of quotidian inspirations to which I will return time and time again, it is Perec who supplied me with le fil conducteur and the motivation for this book. There is a level of abstraction in Lefebvre that makes his work open to multiple interpretations, while Perec’s prose is far more down to earth and yet poetic at the same time. Perec equips us with novel spatial methods of observations of the everyday, that in a later chapter I translate to film analysis. Espèces d’espaces [Species of Spaces] (1974) gave me the structure for analyzing ‘the species of cinematic spaces’. And if this was not enough, Perec was also a film-maker and the inventor of l’écriture-cinéma (Peytard, 1997, pp.33–37). In other words, the difference between Lefebvre and Perec regarding the everyday is that Lefebvre theorizes it while Perec is ‘doing it’ and demonstrates how it works from the ‘inside’.

In Espèces d’espaces, le quotidien is only mentioned three times in 183 pages [French edition] although it is completely central to the book as expressed by Perec in his very first words in the prière d’insérer:⁵

The space of our life is neither continuous, nor infinite, neither homogeneous, nor isotropic. But do we really know where it shatters, where it curves, and where it assembles itself? We feel a confused sensation of cracks, hiatus, points of friction, sometimes we have the vague impression that it is getting jammed somewhere, or that it is bursting, or colliding. We rarely try to know more about it and more often than not go from one place to another, from one space to another without trying to measure, to grasp, to consider these gaps in space. The issue is not to invent space, and even less to re-invent it (too many well-meaning people are responsible for thinking about our environment…), but to interrogate it, or to just read it; because what we call everydayness is not evidence but opacity: a form of blindness, a mode of anaesthesia. It’s from those basic remarks that this book has developed, a diary of a user of space.⁶

(Perec, 1974)

Perec’s writing is particularly attractive and relevant for architects, as it is about space and everyday spaces and how they are lived in and practised. Perec commits to the everyday, inhabits it, breathes it and adheres to it. The everyday is Perec’s matière brut, his primary writing material, which figures at the very top of his list of preoccupations: ‘La première de ces interrogations peut être qualifiée de ‘sociologique’: comme de regarder le quotidien; elle est au départ de textes comme Les Choses, Espèces d’espaces, Tentative de description de quelques lieux parisiens’ [the first of these questions could be construed as ‘sociological’: as when observing the quotidian, it is the starting point for texts such as Les Choses, Espèces d’espaces, Tentative de description de quelques lieux parisiens] (Perec, 2003, p.10). Perec also alludes to the creation of new ‘disciplines’, l’infra-ordinaire and l’endotique.⁷ He hints at a literary enterprise associated with an anthropology of proximity and a sociology of the everyday. Schilling rightly remarks that writing on the quotidian in the French context of the 1960s and 1970s is hardly innocent, and that with his new brand of ‘sociologie de la quotidienneté’ Perec was hinting at much more than he expressed and much less than he could have, given the abundance of literature on the topic of the everyday, in particular from Lefebvre (Schilling, 2006, p.19).

But it would be pointless to put Lefebvre and Perec in opposition, as they were not competing with each other in the way that, for example, Debord and Lefebvre did at some point.⁸ Perec was not an academic and none of his work contains any traditional references or bibliographies – if anything, he was quite capable of inventing them, mixing the real with the imaginary, as if ‘covering his tracks’. Yet his work has an extraordinary internal rigour that he drew from his association with the L’OuLiPo⁹ group and working with self-imposed constraints [les contraintes],¹⁰ a method of working that later appealed to Bernard Tschumi for the Parc de La Villette as he refers to Queneau and Perec for his use of transformations oulipiennes (Tschumi, 2004, p.124).

There is an obvious complementarity between Lefebvre and Perec, which is not surprising given the nature of their collaboration and friendship¹¹ in the 1950s and 1960s (Lefebvre, 2014, p.658). Both collaborated extensively with architects and schools of architecture. From 1968 onwards Lefebvre was very involved with architects and urbanists, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. He lectured in numerous schools of architecture in France as well as abroad, in particular at the School of Architecture in Lausanne (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) where I was studying. I was fortunate to follow his teaching in 1971, in my first year...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Filmography
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 An everyday life approach to architecture
• Part 2 Everydayness and cinema
• Part 3 An architectonic of cinema
• Part 4 Cinematic Aided Design
• Index