On Thursday 15 October, at the Auditorium de Lyon on rue Garibaldi, Don Davis, the composer who scored The Matrix trilogy between 1999 and 2003, conducted his own “Symphonie du Centenaire” with the Orchestre national de Lyon, beneath Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The Institut Lumière listing for the evening names him on the podium. As vl-media.fr put it, the night “ouvrira les célébrations de son centenaire”. The film premiered at the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927, so its hundredth year has only just begun. The score of the 1999 cyberpunk film now wraps around its 1927 ancestor.

What did Lang actually draw? Not only a plot. A section.

Lang said the film “was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924.” He looked into “the glaring lights and the tall buildings” and saw towers that “seemed to be a vertical sail, scintillating and very light.” Written with Thea von Harbou, the screenplay turned that impression into an organisation of space. Per the film’s Wikipedia production history, shooting began on 22 May 1925 on 1.5 million Reichsmarks and closed at 5.3 million.

The people who made the sail stand rarely reach the poster. Art directors Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht built the city; Eugen Schüfftan’s mirror process placed living actors inside miniature sets. Kettelhut first drew a large Gothic cathedral among the skyscrapers. Lang removed it, wanting a city that had turned away from religion. A whole programme deleted from a skyline: a design decision in the plainest sense.

Read the city as a drawing and it is a cut: towers and pleasure gardens on top, machine halls in the middle, the workers’ city underneath. The geometry states its own trade-off: a stack that concentrates light and air at the top concentrates heat, noise and labour at the bottom, and the people below keep the people above running.

←TODAY: Metropolis opens its hundredth year with a new score in Lyon and a 148-minute restoration on screen.
→3012: In Zurich 3012 the lower city is drawn first, and the people who run the building sign the section.
Fulcrum: The section is the one drawing where the roof garden and the plant room must be read together.

In 1925, the year Lang began shooting, Le Corbusier, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887, showed a model of the Plan Voisin in the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau in Paris: 18 identical cruciform towers of sixty storeys on 260 ha of the Right Bank, for 78,000 residents. Two vertical cities in one year. Lang stacked his city to make hierarchy visible; Le Corbusier spread his towers over open ground so every flat would get light and air. Both asked the same question: who lives on top, and who works below?

Every building on a Swiss desk has its own lower city: the Technikzentrale in the second basement, the risers, the sprinkler room, the loading dock. Plans hide it under other plans. Only the long section puts the HVAC technician on the same sheet as the roof terrace.

Atelier: A twelve-person Zürich studio in SIA phase 32 has a coordination model that knows where every plant room sits, and almost never records who must stand there, how often, under what headroom and what daylight. Monday move: add one long section to the current set, roof to lowest plant room, and annotate each technical space with its occupant and visit frequency.

Hack: Cut one long section through the whole Rhino model so the lower city appears on the same sheet as the roof. In a GhPython component in Grasshopper, feed your building breps in as breps and the cut position as x; RhinoCommon, McNeel’s open geometry SDK, returns every curve the plane meets.

import Rhino.Geometry as rg
plane = rg.Plane(rg.Point3d(x, 0, 0), rg.Vector3d.XAxis)
hits = [rg.Intersect.Intersection.BrepPlane(b, plane, 0.001) for b in breps]
a = [c for ok, crvs, pts in hits if ok for c in crvs]

The X-axis normal cuts the building lengthwise, plant rooms included. Bake a to a section layer; the PAZ Grasshopper↔Archicad Library is the route for carrying that cut back into the Archicad set.

The film we can watch at all is owed to archivists. The 1927 release ran 153 minutes, and about 25 were lost for decades until a 16 mm negative surfaced at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires in 2008. The Murnau-Stiftung, the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Museo del Cine restored it to 148 minutes, premiered at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin on 12 February 2010. In 2001 Metropolis had already become the first film on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Preservation is cinema’s lower city: invisible labour holding up the image above.

From where I write, the buildings that aged well were the ones whose basements were drawn with people in them. Draw your project’s lower city, and put its people on the sheet.