The Screenplays are investigations of concepts as well as techniques, proposing simple hypotheses and then testing them out. They explore the relation between events ("the program") and architectural spaces, on one hand, and transformational devices of a sequential nature, on the other.
The use of film images in these works originated in an interest in sequences and programmatic concerns. ("There is no architecture without action, no architecture without event, no architecture without program.") Rather than composing fictional events or sequences, it seemed more informative to act upon existing ones. more
The cinema thus was an obvious source. At the same time, the rich formal and narrative inventions of the only genuine 20th-century art inevitably encouraged parallels with current architectural thought. Flashbacks, crosscutting, jumpcuts, dissolves and other editing devices provided a rich set of analogies to the time-and-space nature of architecture. Yet the concerns of the Screenplays were essentially architectural. They dealt with issues of material (generators of form: reality, abstraction, movement, events, and so forth), device (disjunction, distortion, repetition, and superimposition), and counterpoint (between movement and space, events and spaces, for example). The Screenplays aimed at developing a contemporary set of architectural tools. back
