The literature here is too vast to summarize. A few of the essential positions include Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). On film as laboratory for architectural experiment, see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), and Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).
See, for instance, a number of the contributions in William Saunders, ed. Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 2005).
See, for instance, Dietrich Neumann, ed., Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel, 1996); Mark Lamster, ed. Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); and Bob Fear, ed. “Architecture and Film,” special issue, Architectural Design 70, no. 1 (January 2000); and Hans Dieter Schaal, Learning from Hollywood: Architecture and Film (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2010).
This was argument has been developed in Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti, eds. Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2019).
Recently, the question of grounds and backgrounds has re-emerged as an important topic for art history and media studies. See, for instance, Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux Journal 24, see ®; David Young Kim, Groundwork: A History of the Renaissance Picture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), as well as Weihong Bao’s forthcoming book Background Matters: The Art of Environment in Modern China.
For more information on Dawn, see Craig Barron and Mark Cotta Vaz, The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting (New York: Chronicle, 2002), 31. His earliest film was an architectural travelogue, California Missions (1907), which used glass matte paintings to optically restore buildings that were largely ruined at the time.
One of the conditions driving the insertion of drawings into photomechanical backgrounds was the growing use of site photographs in competitions. For more on these early images, see Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); and Andreas Beitin, Wolf Eiermann, and Brigitte Franzen, eds., Mies van der Rohe: Montage Collage (Aachen: Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, 2017).
For an exemplary reading of the tension between Mies’s 1922 model for a glass skyscraper and its sculpted clay backgrounds, see Spyros Papapetros, “Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film—from Mies to Murnau,” Grey Room 20 (Summer 2005): 6–37.
For a foundational account of the tension between the avant-garde and propagandistic uses of photomontage, see Benjamin H.D. Buchloh “From Faktura to Faktography,” October 30 (Autumn, 1984): 82-119.
Many of the ideas presented in this essay were developed in my Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
For a vivid account of this process, see Gian Piero Frassinelli’s account of making the Superstudio’s photomontages on the website Drawing Matter. See ®.
Superstudio, “Discorsi per immagini,” Domus 481 (December 1969): 44.
Recent theorizations of cultural techniques broadly emphasize how media do not serve to disseminate pre-existing meanings, but are operative chains of actions that precede and structure the very emergence of cultural concepts. For a helpful introduction see, Bernard Sieghert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), and Bernard Geoghegan, “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 66–82.
In 2021, the Impostor Cities project partially wrapped the Canadian pavilion in Venice with a green screen. When viewed through an augmented reality app, scenes from fictional films shot on location in Canada were overlaid on the architecture of the pavilion. Paradoxically, this digital background par excellence was pushed to the foreground, redefining the role of the facade.
Such a claim was the repeated provocation of the Impostor City project. See ®.
Koolhaas’s essay, “The Generic City,” reads as a riposte to Kenneth Frampton’s influential concept of critical regionalism, which stressed the need resist the “relentless onslaught of global modernization” through a critical return to regional tectonic and material traditions. See Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30.
Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in SMLXL, ed. Jennifer Sigler, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 1250.
For a more sustained critique of the account of globalization in Koolhaas’s Generic City, see Esra Akcan, “Reading ‘The Generic City,’” Perspecta 41 (2008), 144-152.
See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
For a succinct statement of Tschumi’s argument, see “Disjunctions,” in Architecture and Disjunction, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
The media sociologist Scott McQuire, in a similar spirit, has argued that the tension between displacement and emplacement are a defining feature of digital media in the contemporary city. See McQuire “The City as Media,” Perspecta 51 (2018), 145.
