ABSTRACT
The end of the twentieth century saw a sudden flurry of concern around the themes of film and architecture, or cinema and the city. 1 It is difficult to ignore the coincidence of this surge of attention with the profound transformation that both film and architecture were experiencing, as each practice found itself being increasingly redefined by digital technologies. The much-celebrated centenary of cinema in 1995 also marked a growing uncertainty about what cinema would become in the looming post-celluloid era. Similarly, architecture found itself at a crossroads, as computer-assisted design systems, first mooted in the 1960s, were turbo-boosted by new visualization capabilities. As digitizing photographic and video images became commonplace, the static forms of elevation and plan ceded authority to animated 3D ‘fly-throughs’, leading Eleftheriades to argue that ‘the world of architecture will merge imperceptibly with the world of cinema.’ 2 But what would such a merging entail?
