ABSTRACT
The 1980s saw the emergence of a form of architecture premised on the conceptual frameworks of deconstruction. Aesthetically, it borrowed from the constructivist architects of the early twentieth century and spatio-temporally it drew parallels with the discontinuity cinema epitomized by Sergei Eisenstein. The lead proponent of this early cinematic parallel with late twentieth-century architecture was Bernard Tschumi. In reaching back to the discontinuity cinema of the 1920s as a conceptual framework with which to scaffold contemporary architectural theory and practice, Tschumi was retreading terrain continually worked throughout the twentieth century by architects of different hues. In placing the relationship between film and architecture back on the agenda, however, his choice of an early twentieth-century filmmaker to do so was revealing. The architecture of the time, it seemed, lacked a contemporaneous reference point of the cinema.
