Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture

This is a manifesto for an architecture that transforms solid materiality into the appearance of energy and spatiality - a cinematic architecture in which the main building material is light.

For Pascal Schöning, the architect is to be understood as the director of a series of related temporary manifestations:

'If architecture is often compared to cinema, it is because of their shared relation to both the visual world and the material world: the way they magnify, through their psychic image, the dimension of the physical universe: its surface, frame, light and depth. In architecture as in cinema, the mixing of "physicality" with the world of signs leads to what Godard calls the light of their absence of explanation.

'It is when we touch the depths of personal and collective memory that architecture and cinema reveal their constructive force. It is when architecture and cinema deploy their physical means their interactions and their assemblage that they show their mythopoetic inspiration. The production of images by cinema is the epitome of the physical construction of space by architecture.'

Pascal Schöning has taught at the AA since 1983. He combines teaching with work in fields related to architecture, urbanism, arts, film, literature and culture management. A Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture is the summation of more than 20 years' work and includes not only Schöning's own texts and visualisations but also the beautiful and ethereal projects developed by his students at the Architectural Association.