In the last decades, architecture has embraced the medium of film to explore new readings of spaces and atmospheres. Crafting a visual narrative of the underlying design concepts while also establishing a connection with the viewer, architecture films use cinematic camera movements and carefully curated sound designs to convey emotion and create a compelling impression of the built object. The article looks into architecture films as a means of capturing the experience of a space, with films by 9sekunden, a team of young designers who combine their passions for film and architecture into an alternative means of exploring architectural atmospheres.
Architecture and film have an almost symbiotic relationship, which has long fascinated architects and has been the topic of numerous books and articles. In Montage and Architecture, director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein underlines how the montage technique is cinema's analogue for architecture's use of spatial sequences. Conversely, Bernard Tschumi has cited cinema and the Soviet technique of the montage as the inspiration for Parc d la Villette in Paris. The two fields are inextricably linked, and just as cinema cannot be devoid of spatial context, the way film makes use of built space, light, scale and framing provides the profession with an essential source of inspiration. Moreover, cinema inadvertently registered the evolution of architecture and the urban fabric through the 20th century, thus becoming a fascinating archive for the field of architecture.
