Cinema Builders - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

EDWIN HEATHCOTE is an architect and writer living and working in London. He writes on architecture for the Financial Times as well as other specialist architectural and design journals, and is the author of a number of books including Budapest: A guide to twentieth-century architecture (1998) and Theaatre London (2001) for Ellipsis and Church Builders (1997), Monument Builders (1998) and Bank Builders (2000) for John Wiley Sons. He is also a founder and director of design company izé .

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The cinema is a space of transformation, the gatewary to a world of infinite possibilities. Its architecture has had either to suggest the fantasy worlds which lie within or to reflect and magnify the vibrancy, the vision and the aspirations of the metropolis. The newness of the building type, the lack of precedent and the classlessness of the audience made the cinema the perfect vehicle for modern architecture.

In this book Edwin Heathcote oulines the development of the cinema as a modern building type and traces the history and fashions which have prevailed in the most populist of architectures, from the fairground booth to the megaplex. The bulk of the book is taken up by a selective international survey of modern cinema design, from the blatantly commercial through the self-consciously kitsch to the avant-garde. It is the first book of recent years to set about defining the state of contemporary cinema, and acts as a guide to one of the fastest changing and most genuinely popular and responsive buiding types. 

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The cinema is a space of transformation, the gatewary to a world of infinite possibilities. Its architecture has had either to suggest the fantasy worlds which lie within or to reflect and magnify the vibrancy, the vision and the aspirations of the metropolis. The newness of the building type, the lack of precedent and the classlessness of the audience made the cinema the perfect vehicle for modern architecture.

In this book Edwin Heathcote oulines the development of the cinema as a modern building type and traces the history and fashions which have prevailed in the most populist of architectures, from the fairground booth to the megaplex. The bulk of the book is taken up by a selective international survey of modern cinema design, from the blatantly commercial through the self-consciously kitsch to the avant-garde. It is the first book of recent years to set about defining the state of contemporary cinema, and acts as a guide to one of the fastest changing and most genuinely popular and responsive buiding types.

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Introduction

The Picture House - Development of a New Building Type

The roots of the picture house lie in travelling fairground booths and seedy, run-down dives; in rented halls, semi-derelict shops and dark, dangerous caverns with wooden benches. These darkened rooms were prone to bursting into flame due to the notorious instability of early film materials and equipment. Within three decades of these unrespectable and inauspicious beginnings, the cinema had become the fastest growing and most recognisable new building type of the twentieth century. The cinema became a new focus in the urban landscape as influential as the church and more so than the theatre or the vaudevillian music hall which it replaced as the pivotal media of public entertainment. In a staggeringly short space of time the cinema had become established as the undisputed everyman's venue for a night out.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this astonishingly rapid development and acceptance of the cinema as a Saturday night institution, the movies never quite attained acceptance as a respectable art form - the cinema as always retained something of the brashness and the self-promoting vulgarity of the fairground booths from its origins. From the earliest peep-shows which attracted people with 'What the Butler Saw' to the vast out-of-town multiplexes showing the same Hollywood blockbusters on six screens each of which is seeped in the sickly-sweet smell of popcorn and hot-dogs, there remains a sense of the populist which seems both repellant and attractive. Like that other great new twentieth century building-type, the airport, the cinema promises new worlds, a transport to fantastic realms and it holds out the notion that it could become a new public forum, that the cinema foyer, like the airport terminal, could have become a place for all classes and types to interact and communicate, a new urban hub. In fact, both the airport and the cinema tend towards the super-shed; sophistacted circulation systems with big hangars on the end which fulfill the function of getting passengers or customers through the building as quickly and efficiently as possible while spending plenty of money along the way.

In between the early years of the fairground both at the end of the nineteenth century and the years of the super-sheds at the end of the twentieth and beginnings of the twenty-first century, however, there was an age where the cinema became the dream-palace, a building which embodied escape and fantasy, a temporary relief from the mundane and repetitive world of work. Cinemas, every bit as much as films, are the physical embodiment of their eras. The extravagent choreographed musicals of Busby Berkeley and the glittering Art Deco picture palaces of the 1930s encapsulate the urge to escape from depression and insecurity which plagued a decade which followed in the wake of the 1929 financial crash. The B-movie horror of aliens and radiation and the drive-in theatres of the 1950s represented both the fear of Communism and the pioneering spirit of the USA and its self-mythologising love of freedom (the car) and the frontier spirit (the open cinemas in the wilderness). the emergence of the art-house fleapit in the 1950s and 60s reflected a rebellion against Hollywood escapism and a belated response to Italian neo-realism (itself a response to the tragedy of the war) which moved far away from escapism but also denoted an acceptance of cinema as an avant-garde art form - the intellectuals wrenched glamour away from the cinema and replaced it with angst. Existential angst demanded ascetic fleapits to remove the last traces of escapism. The emergence of the super cinemas, anonymous out-of-town complexes exclusively showing big studio blockbusters echoed the laissez-faire and self-satisfaction of the Reagan/Thatcher era, an age of increasing corporate domination and decreasing acceptance of the avant-garde. The arrival of that even more overblown concept, the megaplex, coincided with the collapse of opposition to international capitalism, it signalled the victory of corporate, global economics.

The popular roots of cinema also initially agitated against its acceptance as an important art form. When film itself became recognised as the definitive twentieth century art form, indeed the only truly popular modern art form, the cinemas were somehow left behind. As film was becoming credible, the Art Deco dream palaces were being destroyed. The frothy, shallow, tacked-on buildings which housed the defining years of film were never really regarded by the architectural establishment as part of their world. Cinemas were seen as every bit as ephemeral and disposable as the film-sets which lit up their screens. The aesthetics of the 1930s were defined by a love of the luxury expressed in the detailing and streamlining of ocean liners and the glamour of Hollywood both of which were translated into built form in virtually every prosperous city in the cinema. With the incursions of television and, even more significantly, video in the 1970s and 80s, the cinemas were seen as redundant behemoths, some were converted, many others demolished.

Perhaps no film better illustrates this demise than Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe's Tornatore's paean to the influence not just of film but to the physical fabric of the cinema. As the film's central character returns to his little town for the funeral of his beloved projectionist, the cinema is being torn down while a few old-timers who he remembers from his childhood look on sadly. The demolition of the cinema seems to indicate the destruction of community - it is being replaced by a car park, but also the abandonment of the communal dreams and fantasies which the cinema embodied. Recently, however, the revival of city-centre cinemas and a few, lavish and enjoyably kitschy out-of-town monsterplexes has led to a revival of interest in the architecture of cinemas. In this book I hope to document the highlights of this revival and provide a cross section of cinema building a century after its genesis.