Architecture and the movies : two examples

Abstract

This thesis is a speculative inquiry into the relationship between movies and architecture, both of which are forms of expression simultaneously particular to the artist who created them and general, illustrative of a larger cultural sensibility. Both reveal a cultural condition: its authorities, its emphases, its concerns: And yet, as forms of expression, they are very different architecture is tactile and spatial, it is the world constructed: movies are two dimensional depictions , they are "the world viewed." But in this, we see that a relationship between them may go beyond the parallels and distinctions of their existence in the culture. Movies are unique among forms of depiction in that, through the arrangement of images in sequence, they represent movement In this, they evoke our own experience in the world and suggest the dynamic complexity of man's relation to built form and space. This thesis will examine two American movies made twenty years apart, for their revelations of a cultural understanding of built form and space. This thesis also has a second intent derived from the first. If we can think of movies as a kind of mirror of popular understanding, can we also think of them as a model, as influencing that understanding?