Posted on: 12th June 2020
Starting during Quarantine in March 2020, Movies in Wonderland started the Online Architecture Film Festival on the topic of “Building Spatial Justice.” Teaming up with the online arts magazine Art in Words, Movies in Wonderland curated a series of freely accessible films related to architecture, urbanism, and design.
Enjoy!
PROGRAM
Powers of Ten. R: Eames Office, 9 min, engl. OV, (USA 1977)
A classic among design films that is so completely different from the others: The duo Ray and Charles Eames take us on a journey through space, from the macro to the microcosm. The film from 1977 is reminiscent of today’s visual and media communication of the pandemic: from global mapping to the greatly enlarged and detailed graphical representation of the corona viruses, which are only a few nanometers in size, which is now also part of the collective consciousness.
wie wir wohnen – ein Stadtlabor des AzW. R: Mies. Magazin, 40 min, deutsche OV, (AT 2019)
It is hard to imagine that a year ago it was still possible to carry out the largest living experiment in Vienna, in which dozens of people swapped apartments for a weekend, as it were on blind dates. For the short documentary, Mies.Magazin accompanied three swap couples on their expedition through their own city. “How we live” was created as a city laboratory for the City of Vienna in a cooperation between the AzW and the Mies. Magazine.
Shelter in Place. R: Matthew Beck, 13:47 min, engl. OV, (USA 2020)
Shelter in Place addresses the seemingly unbridgeable distance between neighbors on a street in New York’s Morningside Heights district in times of pandemic. Street photographer Matthew Beck does not paint a picture of his street in the middle of the action as usual, but through the view out of the window, which currently means the world to him.
In Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal’s architectures, space is always on the agenda. Living spaces merge with open spaces, threshold spaces form transitions between indoor and outdoor areas, and not just for wealthy customers, but above all in their clear and intelligent renovation measures for social housing in the banlieues of France in the 1960s and 1970s. The filmmaker Karine Dana outlines the lightness of these airy rooms, which literally let us breathe a sigh of relief after weeks of confinement.
Lost World. R: Kalyanee Mam, 16:00 min, OmeU, (KH/SG 2018)
According to science, one of the causes of these and impending future pandemics is the increasing destruction of fragile ecosystems. Lost World by Kalyanee Mam describes the mining of millions of tons of sand on the coasts of Cambodia, which is intended for the construction boom and the expansion of the land mass in Singapore. It’s hard to believe, but the proverbial sand by the sea is now becoming a scarce resource worldwide. Should we rethink the approach of destroying mangrove forests in order to artificially fill in land thousands of kilometers away?
The Flying Gardeners. R: Giacomo Boeri & Matteo Grimaldi, 9:02 min, ohne Sprache, (IT 2016)
Milan’s flying gardeners soar through a vertical forest in the middle of the city every four months. You are botanists and climbers, and know well the only hidden habitats that this incomparable forest has created. Design and nature complement each other in Stefano Boeri’s design for the Bosco Verticale. A first step in the right direction, the future probably follows a much more radical fusion of built and natural environment.
Like Lacaton & Vassal and Studio Boeri, the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré works on solutions for ecological and social sustainability in building. Here, the sand for the school and community buildings is not transported over long distances, but processed directly on site using the knowledge and skills of the future users in Gando, Burkina Faso. The photographer and filmmaker Candida Richardson portrayed Kéré’s approach to architecture and space in her series Sensing Spaces – Architecture Re-Imagined as part of the exhibition of the same name at the Royal Academy of Art in London.
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