BOREDOM

I love the way Preston Scott Cohen thinks about architecture. One of his ideas is about the plan in architecture in comparison to the frame in film. The most radical and rare buildings tend to have a form that, when understood through the convention of the plan, presents a kind of changing narrative. As you take horizontal slithers, at arbitrary intervals, each drawing is different. You need to see all the plans to understand the whole building. He sites the Guggenheim in New York by Frank Lloyd Write as an example. He equates this with the most common and conventional way of making a film. If you think of the single frame as the equivalent of the plans that cut through a building. Each frame is different and adds more to the story.

Conversely, the most radical form of film Scott suggests, is Andy Warhol’s - Sleep. It’s eight hours of Warhol’s boyfriend sleeping. There’s no narrative structure - it’s almost a single repetitive frame. Scott compares this to the most common and conventional form in architecture - the extrusion where every floor plan is the same. The building does very little to narrate anything.

There is another way to look at this. I wonder if Mies repetitive order quietens the chaotic mind, and puts us into a place of higher consciousness. I think Warhol was in a state of love when he filmed this. The boredom of nothing happening brings forth the pregnant silence. Mies, not the copies, are the most rare and radical. And the Seagram Building can be compared to Sleep.