{This essay will be the introductory chapter in Juhani Pallasmaa`s forthcoming book The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, Rakennustieto, Helsinki, 2000.}

Since the late 1970s, architecture has fervently sought connections with other fields of art. Inspiration for breaking through the prevailing paradigm of architecture, petrified by quasi-modernist professional praxis, has been sought in painting and sculpture, as well as in literature and music. In architectural schools and professional practice alike, architectural projects have been generated through an analysis of the compositional structure of Vermeer`s as well as the Cubists` paintings, the music of Bach as well as Meredith Monk, the literary fragments of Heraclitus as well as Herman Melville`s Moby Dick and James Joyce`s Finnegan`s Wake.1At the same time, an unforeseen exploration into the theoretical foundations of architecture has taken place, and almost any theoretical approach devised in the various fields of scientific scrutiny has been applied to its study. This frantic interest in expanding the scope of architectural thought clearly indicates that the art of architecture has become uncertain of its essence and future course. In all fields of art, the breakdown of the unified modernist world view has, in fact, created a distinct panic of representation. In architecture, the modernist, postmodern and deconstructionist views of representation coexist simultaneously, and the spectrum of architectural style is more colorful than ever before with the exception of, perhaps, the first half of the 1800s when a single architect, like Leo von Klenze, could build a palace and a university in Renaissance style, a museum in Greek style, a parliament building in Neo-Hellenic style, a church based on Capella Palatina in Palermo, a Hall of Fame in the antique idiom, an official residence in Roman Baroque, and a coffee-house or synagogue with Moorish features.2 In many schools of architecture around the world, the most recent interest is cinema. Films are studied for the purpose of discovering a more subtle and responsive architecture. Also some of the most esteemed representatives of the architectural avant-garde of today, like Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Coop Himmelb{l}au and Jean Nouvel have admitted the significance of cinema in the formation of their approach to architecture.3 In its inherent abstractness, music has historically been regarded as the art form which is closest to architecture. Cinema is, however, even closer to architecture than music, not solely because of its temporal and spatial structure, but fundamentally because both architecture and cinema articulate lived space. These two art forms create and mediate comprehensive images of life. In the same way that buildings and cities create and preserve images of culture and a particular way of life, cinema illuminates the cultural archeology of both the time of its making and the era that it depicts. Both forms of art define the dimensions and essence of existential space; they both create experiential scenes of life situations. Architecture In Cinema - Cinema In Architecture Cinema is a multi-dimensional art form as Jean-Luc Godard states: `There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Resnais, who sculpts. Like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once, both judge and litigant.`4 Godard`s list of the alternative ways of film making could be expanded by one more specific mode: cinema as architecture. The interaction of cinema and architecture - the inherent architecture of cinematic expression, and the cinematic essence of architectural experience - is equally many- sided. Both are art forms brought about with the help of a host of specialists, assistants an
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