A house is not a home.

In his just-published Manifesto for a cinematic architecture,* the teacher Pascal Schoning describes how such an architecture 'aims to dissolve or expose the concept of a static material world through a buzz of constant change', and that it 'reveals the illusiveness of the house as a reliable and constant factor, and shifts the focus instead to life and narrative processes. Perhaps the house can only be an enabler of life narration itself'. This presents a nice problem for any architectural publication in attempting, on the one hand, to avoid showing what Schoning would think of as 'an endless repetition of solid-state modernist buildings', but on the other conveying architectural intention rather than the streams of consciousness which constitute the buildings' clients and users. The static nature of architecture itself, and its inevitable magazine representation as just that, cries out for the addition of movement and change. How, one may ask, can one represent life and even spatiality in a two-dimensional form, by definition frozen in time and space? For comparison, Schoning cites the Jean-Luc Godard aphorism that film is 'truth 24 times a second'.

The answer, such as it is, must be that it is the viewer/reader who completes the picture. They will do so in different ways depending on their individual histories, and what they notice when they look. Cineastes will recognise this proposition from the world of French film criticism, in which even modest studio formula films occasionally achieve interest on the basis of the individual perception by each character of events which the audience is assumed to 'read' collectively. The same basic conditions may be treated in quite different ways, for example as farce or tragedy, as Woody Allen's 'Melinda and Melinda' recently showed: farce is the tragedy that happens to outsiders; tragedy is the farce that happens to you. The screenplay (cf plan and section) takes you down one path or the other.

Just as cineastes will view a film in a different way to cinema's regular public, so architects viewing the work of another on the printed page bring their own architectural memories and opinions to what they see. Those reactions are unlikely to replicate the experiences of non-architects who inhabit most houses. (Nor are they the same as would occur as the result of a physical visit, when sensual response comes into play.) They are what they are, and may result in inspiration or merely the logging of visual information. For architectural magazines there are elements of 'how did they do that?' and indeed 'why did they do that?' in the presentation, which publication of the diagram, plan and section attempts to address. It is absolutely right that these representations are only a part of the story and cannot be the whole of it, any more than the house or apartment can be the whole story of an individual's life. On the other hand, as architecture is inextricably linked with memory, the idea of the house looms large in the life of the architect, as much, say, as early trips to the cinema play in the life of the film director. 'Cinema Paradiso' was essentially about coming home.

* Architectural Association, 2006