Beyond the Intersecting Plane

Abstract

The Architect uses the intersecting plane – the section - to explore elements that are hidden from the eye; by slicing through to the concealed. The Painter uses it as a canvas in which to tell the story only the eye is afforded to see. The Director’s is often dynamic and must always shift to a narrative. When said director is Wes Anderson however, these delineations are negotiated. Filmmaker Wes Anderson’s intersecting plane is an architectural section of a fictional environment. Attention is drawn not only to a portrayed film reality, but to the illusive reality attached to it. In a cinematic culture obsessed with creating seamless visual illusion, he pans the camera back so the audience sees beyond the frame; revealing sincerity in the form of architectural clarity and play in its breaking of the fourth wall. Critical architectural representation vs. poetic perspective becomes a dialogue when in the form of a Wes Anderson section. Anderson’s auteuristic vision goes beyond merely ‘placing’ audience at the edge of a scene. Guided by his unique narrative, the camera moves from the poetic space to critical architecture; moving in and out of a scene, panning up, down and across, from the painter’s perspective to the architect’s section cut. If the body is a camera, we too move, as a conscious architectural audience, from the poetic to the critical, narrating for ourselves the spaces that move us, the scenes that give us context. Through the exploration and understanding of Anderson’s objectives in exercising the architect’s section it is hoped that a paradigm for overlapping poetry and criticism can be ascertained. This research asks ‘what if’ architecture was approached with a filmmaker’s understanding of section. What forms and expressions must this provoke, to propose an architecture where the inhabitant experiences not only the architect’s architecture, but the painter’s and director’s also; as inhabitants of poetry and criticism.