Temporal Experiences of Architecture through the Lens of Cinema: Haptic Visuality and Built Environments in Andrei Tarkovsky's Films

Abstract

This study takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the temporal experience and character of built environments. While arguing against the dominance of visual means as the principal perception modality, this thesis also explores an alternative approach to the temporal experience of built environments based on the haptic and tactile perceptions. After examining literature that stresses ocularcentrism as a cause-and-consequence of the culture of speed, appeared in modernity, this thesis focuses on two key concepts of movement and memory. Viewing these two concepts through a phenomenological perspective, I elaborate the significance of haptic perception—the integration of senses such as movement, touch and embodied memory—in relation to the temporal experience of architecture. To offer an alternative model of experiencing built environments, I use cinema as the means to explore and illustrate how haptic experiences and epistemologies can shape our experience of the temporal in architecture. I select two exemplary works by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986): Solaris (1972) and Nostalgia (1983). The aim is to elucidate how through a style of what is now commonly referred to as ‘slow cinema’ these two films trigger a sense of time, memory and history by appealing to haptic experiences. While the first chapter demonstrates that the perception of architecture through the complexities of sensations has been partly obscured by the dominance of vision, it also suggests that in extending this critique to all forms of visuality, the architectural theory fails to address the vision that is intersubjective. Retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and cinema studies, the second chapter explains Laura Marks’s theory of ‘haptic visuality’ as an alternative model of seeing, in which the eye works as an organ that could produce haptic sensations through the body. While my use of Tarkovsky’s films is informed by the theory of haptic visuality, which also transforms the ocularcentric character that cinema shares with much of contemporary architecture, the third chapter considers Gilles Deleuze’s concepts in timeII image cinema to explore the temporal possibilities of the haptic. By focusing on Deleuze’s categories of images in time-image cinema and the way their temporal implications inform Marks’s theory of haptic visuality, this chapter illuminates how the durable engagement of the eye with the image/space is a temporal perception in itself. The fourth and fifth chapters examine Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Nostalgia to map a set of unique aesthetic strategies across the two films, which work as an analogue to haptic experiences of the temporal in built environments. As a whole, this thesis aims to outline the implications of considering haptic sensibilities in architectural thinking and, consequently, to place the discussion of temporal possibilities of the haptic within the so-called Slow Movement (coined in 2004). In this respect, the concluding chapter puts forth the aesthetic of slowness in architecture as something that in its opposition to the compression of temporality in today’s built environment aims to value haptic spaces that encourage a sense of ‘slowness’ necessary to experience the intensity of memory.