Hollow Hollywood:
Architecture Refamiliarized
Nile Greenberg and Michael Abel Deng
Summer 2025
Cornell AAP - NYC Arch 7111 Design A Summer 2025
Tata Innovation Center
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12:00pm-6:30pm
Hollywood Refamiliarized
The architecture of film—soundstages, studio lots, and production facilities—underpins an industry that became a dominant cultural force in the postwar period. Architecturally, these spaces are engineered as hollow containers, untethered from climate, atmosphere, or daylight. Time itself is evacuated as its performance far predates its viewership. Well beyond the parameters of the modernist obsessions of column-free space (though it's worth discussing Konrad Wachsmann's “Post-architectural Transmissions”01) these structures are designed to suppress not only sound and light, but even gravity itself, thanks to their highly structural roofs.
Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio 1895
Necessitating a highly technical apparatus, the soundstage began in a scientific way with studios like Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio in 1893 in West Orange, New Jersey02. It was a building covered in black tar paper that entirely rotated on a turntable altering the solar orientation along with hinged roof elements to allow sunlight in. Despite being viewed in theatrical venues, soundstages rarely took cues from the architecture of theaters, only their stages. At this moment performance and spectatorship are set far apart, a disjunction only now beginning to reconcile. While theater retained the presence of the audience and absorbed prevailing architectural norms, performance itself moved offsite and out of sync, sustained only by an architecture of production. This spatial and temporal split gave rise to the studio system. Over the following century, the gap between performance and viewership expanded and contracted with each new technology (sound, broadcast, color, digital cameras, streaming) often mirrored by shifts in architecture. This long arc culminates today in the smartphone, where camera and screen—production and reception—are collapsed into a single device.
There are key differences between film production and traditional performing arts. Film production operates through temporal fragmentation: scenes shot out of sequence, performances constructed through multiple takes, and narratives assembled in post-production. While its stories may resemble those of the stage, the point of view does not. In cinema, the lens is not fixed—it is a participant, an active agent within the ensemble. The performance in a soundstage exists in conditional time, where the architectural envelope serves not to contain a singular event but to enable the infinite variations. The theater's relationship to its audience is immediate and reciprocal; the soundstage's relationship to its viewer is mediated through delay and layers of technological processing. This disconnection from real-time necessitates the soundstage's architectural hollowness—it cannot be specific in any capacity apart from its technical neutrality.
Eadweard Muybridge 24 Camera Setup 1878
In contrast, architects today increasingly operate in real-time. As John J. May observes in Signal. Image. Architecture., the contemporary design process is shaped by continuous image capture, simulation, and live rendering: tools that prioritize immediacy, feedback, and responsiveness03. Design decisions are made in synchrony with their digital representations, often collapsing the delay between conception, revision, and visualization. While the soundstage suspends time, architecture is now synchronized with it. This inversion—between the delayed temporality of cinematic production and the real-time feedback loops of architectural design—marks a fundamental shift in how space is conceived, coordinated, and rendered visible.
The performing arts and architecture share a fundamental condition: their material is reality. Unlike painting, photography, or sculpture—mediums defined by oil, chemicals, or stone, and historically measured by their ability to depict reality—architecture and performance begin within the real. They are composed of space, bodies, light, sound, and time as lived phenomena. As such, both fields have had to develop techniques to transform the real into the representational. A conversation on stage, for example, is never just a conversation—it is a spatial and temporal construction. Similarly, architecture organizes real-world constraints into forms that exceed mere utility. The real is not avoided but composed.
The traditional example is the proscenium arch. Positioned at the downstage edge, it forms the “fourth wall.” Often gilded like a picture frame, it serves as the architectural threshold that formalizes the contract between audience and performer: what occurs on stage is representational, distanced from reality. As modernization heightened, the proscenium arch became an overfamiliar construct to politically motivated audiences. Berthold Brecht and others recognized that the illusion of theater was failing, the proscenium arch was preventing authentic engagement with performance, and the distance had become too great between reality and the stage04. As part of this crisis of relevance, the 4th wall is broken and techniques of defamiliarization emerge as a response, forcing audiences and performers to contend with the contradictions of performance and life.
Festspielhaus Hellerau Stage by Adolphe Appia 1913
It is no accident that Duchamp and the Dadaists recognized how familiarity could be transformed into representational space—borrowing strategies of defamiliarization from Brechtian theater. Architects, too, responded to this cultural shift, shedding the proscenium arch in favor of new spatial arrangements. Heinrich Tessenow’s theater at Hellerau, for example, replaced frontal orientation with universal lighting from all sides, equalizing audience and performer within a shared volume. Stages designed by Adolphe Appia extended this approach, rejecting illusionism in favor of modular platforms and ambient light. An early precursor to the soundstage more than the theater. Simultaneously, cinema was demonstrating ways to manipulate time, space, and perspective, making the stage itself something to reconsider as relevant. Since the advent of cinema a mere 125 years ago, it has slowly replaced live performance (and other forms of art) in popular discourse.
Pinch to zoom to today:we inhabit a world with multi-dimensional digital space with a two-dimensional digital overlay. Mediation now happens in real time. Performer and viewer exist in a state of continuous, scaleless motion—a handheld digital proscenium arch rests in our palms, capturing and broadcasting life simultaneously. The 100 year period defined by the elimination of the proscenium arch, the birth of the studio system, new forms of mediation in performance and film establishing itself as a dominant popular art form is over. The time delays associated with film are behind us, as is the unmediated object of the readymade. In their place: the real-time, the augmented, the algorithmic—each requiring new forms of mediation and, inevitably, new responses from architecture.
So what happens now? How do we build for a world already performing itself?
Paramount Studios with Town and Mountain. Date Unknown
Over the course of the 20th century, film will overtake the stage and with that a massive infrastructure of secret performing arts centers (soundstages) will form small cities within cities equipped with housing, schools, labor sites, emergency systems, etc. Paramount studios (Los Angeles, 1926), Cinecittà Studios (Rome, 1937), Boulogne-Billancourt studios (France, 1922), Vitagraph Studios (New York, 1897), Babelsberg Studio (Germany, 1912). The studio system coevolved with political infrastructure in the 20th century, some being state controlled and built like Cinecitta by Benito Mussolini and others in the US being privately built but becoming one of the most important unions in the country including recent 2023 double strike of the WGA (writers guild of america) and SAG-AFTRA (actor’s union).
Across New York and other major cities there is a major push on developing studios and soundstages being built for live TV, movies, television shows, award shows and other digital media. These buildings take many forms such as traditional studio buildings like Wildflower Studios in Queens to being embedded in skyscrapers like the new Disney HQ in Manhattan. They are funded from private and public hands and operate out-of-sight from the public qualities of similarly blooming public institutions like museums.
These historic film and TV production sites, alongside the legacy of the proscenium arch, are the departure points for our architecture studio. The assignment: to design a Soundstage Refamiliarized that offers capture and audience in equal measure, integrated with the city. A new public architecture for the infinite era, a contemporary condition of continuous digital mediation and asynchronous public engagement. Not an opera house or an arts building, but a performance and capture space demanding new architectural form and character. A space of labor, viewership, performance, economy and policy.
Discourse: Hollow
The purpose of using the soundstage as an studio design project is to examine new acts of mediation, but also to consider a particular type of architecture that is Hollow. Contemporary architecture has abandoned its faith in material or tectonic honesty for something more adequate for today: the hollow shell. Where the Smithsons once insisted that buildings could speak clearly through exposed concrete and steel, today's architectural truth emerges from the frank acknowledgment of emptiness itself.
Village Roadshow Studios. 2025. Queensland, Australia.
Fire ratings, energy codes, BIM workflows, and real estate speculation have conspired to displace structural expression with envelope obsession, creating buildings that appear as a hollow-solid from the outside expressing their deliberately vacant, endlessly adaptable interiors. This is not a failure of architectural conviction but a new form of honesty—one that recognizes buildings as provisional frameworks shaped more by financial constraints and regulatory demands than by any romantic notion of tectonic authenticity. We now inhabit structures that function as zones of possibility, with a performance-driven skin enclosing spaces designed for infinite reprogramming rather than fixed occupation.
This hollow condition builds upon a long history of architectural emptiness and marks a departure from its empty predecessors. Colonial warehouses masked imperial extraction through strategic opacity; industrial machine halls organized labor through visible emptiness; modernist universal space promised liberation through “neutrality.” But where earlier emptiness served control, efficiency, or ideological concealment, contemporary hollowness becomes expressive—a visible strategy presenting architecture's role as both financial instrument and social space. Projects like Mies's Neue Nationalgalerie or the Smithsons' "charged void" anticipated this shift, demonstrating how meaningful emptiness could be framed and bound to generate political agency. Yet only now, under the pressure of market volatility and climate crisis, has emptiness itself become the primary architectural product. If architecture once placed its faith in truth to materials, it now finds unexpected candor in truth to emptiness, acknowledging its improbable position as both real estate instrument and space where new social arrangements might emerge.
Citations:
01 Wigley, Mark. Konrad Wachsmann's Television: Post-architectural Transmissions. Sternberg Press, 2020.
02 Jacobson, Brian. Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space. Columbia University Press, 2015. Chapter 1: Introduction.
03 May, John. "Everything is Already an Image." Log, no. 40, 2017, pp. 9-26.
04 Brecht, Bertolt. "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting." 1936. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964.
05 Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999. "Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation."
06 Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 1831. "This Will Kill That."