The other way we want to think about the relationship between buildings and movies is to examine the roles of buildings, homes and interior spaces in movies. Meaning, how are they pictured and narrated. A building in the actual world is not the same as the building it becomes on film. Several changes occur, the most evident of which is that the building no longer tells the story that it tells in reality. This type of inquiry—of the building in film—is synchronic, meaning, a simultaneous inquiry of the building in the film. On screen a building is a representation of a real building but it has a completely different function, role, narrative from the building it represents. An example: in The 6th Day (2000), directed by Rodger Spottiswoode, the Vancouver Public Library (1995), designed by Moshe Safdie, plays the role of the headquarters for an evil biotech firm called Replacement Technologies. The destruction of the building is the destruction of the evil empire. The role of the building in The 6th Day is entirely opposite that which it has in real life.

In real life it is a public institution, a space of open knowledge, free information, and this is what the architect, Safdie, tried to express by referencing its design to a large Roman coliseum, a spectacle of public space, public expression. In the movie the building is completely private, restricted, an enclosure of controlled, commodified information. The large size of the actual public library is transformed: it becomes the monstrosity, the spectacle of private capital—its hubris, its greed, its drive to grow and capitalize everything.

What the synchronic approach helps us to see is that buildings in the real world actually tell stories. In the movie, it is clear that this is what the building is doing: it’s telling us what role it has in the fictional society—who owns it, what kind of ownership is it, what is the owner(s) motive and mood (or stimmung). When we see the narrative role a building assumes in a movie then we become aware of the fact that it also has a narrative role in regular life. In the case of the Vancouver Public Library, it tells us the story of how Rome’s primary public institution is connected with Vancouver’s primary public institution.

Victor Hugo also discusses the narrativity of architecture in the chapter “This Shall Kill That,” but from a diachronic position. Architecture, according to Hugo, “began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world.”

A little later in the chapter: “They made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.”

The story of society was told by the columns, the walls, the steps, the entrances of its buildings. This was the state of things until the arrival of the “luminous press Gutenberg.” With the press, the story of a society could be told by its books. This is the great rupture, the breaking point between the age of architecture and the age of literature. “Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture [was] the principal writing, the universal writing. In that granite book, began by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle-Ages wrote the last page.”

The 19th century witnessed the peak, the full flowering of printing technology: the novel. Literary masters like Hugo, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Melville produced narrative monuments for and of their societies. Their books gave shape and substance to national identities.

In his short essay, “19th Century Novel,” Vancouver-based literary theorist James Latteier writes: “The nineteenth is the unheimlich century, the century that didn't know itself. It was thrilled to catch sight of itself, a little disheveled, a little disreputable, in the mirror of its novels. The Russian middle class seems to have sprung fully formed out of the heads of their novelists, the same is true to a lesser extent for Europe… At their peak Victor Hugo, the Goncourt brothers, Charles Dickens, could sell 50,000 copies of their serialized output per week. The 1871 penny edition of Oliver Twist sold 150,000 copies in just three weeks.”

Later in that essay: “The Victorian novel did not merely reflect the Victorian public, more than anything else it instructed them. Dickens taught his readers not to accept blandly the pronouncements of public officials; George Eliot implied that life was real and earnest; Henry James taught them to be acute consumers of their own emotions. But in a short while all the sweetness and light that Matthew Arnold longed after would cease to flow and public educators would shut up. Great books were written around the turn of the century, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, each one as if packing a trunk against a long interregnum of war and chaos. None of the novels of the period is more compendious than Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.”

Matthew Arnold’s 19th century project was not only to position criticism as the highest form of literature (for an age in “contraction”) but also to make literature the ground of an English education, the study of which produced ideal subjects for the state and its colonies. The novelist not only mirrored the present condition, he also invented the past. For example, the term “renaissance” was not first used by a 16th century Italian artist or architect but by a French novelist, Balzac, in 1829. The French word named/invented a period of time that Balzac’s generation wanted to rediscover and emulate. The novelist was the king, the creator, the namer of things and social situations, and he enjoyed this dominant position until the arrival of the director.

When the novelist, the high priest for literature, first saw Louis Lumiere’s motion picture camera in 1895, he should have said what Hugo’s priest said when first seeing the Gutenberg press: “This will kill that.”

The 20th century was not primarily narrated by architecture, or by novels, but film. Dickens, Dostoevsky, Melville were replaced by Chaplin, Tarkovsky and Kubrick. That is the chronological relationship cinema has with architecture: they are the big storytellers, the big narrative banks. Architecture told the biggest stories until the arrival of the novel; the novel told biggest stories until the arrival of cinema. But history does not end on film. Time is still very much alive. The future persists and is pointing in a whole new narrative direction. Cinema’s primacy is presently challenged by a relatively new technology that’s quickly leading the way to a new dominant narrative institution. We believe that technology is the Internet. We believe this will be the order of understanding in the near future: architecture spoke for the ancient world, the novel for Europe, film for the American age, and what’s presently emerging from cyberspace will speak to and for a consciousness that is planetary, global, post-national, post-American.

When the first modem came into existence, the film director should have stopped and yelled in fear: “This Will Kill That.”