An Antidote For Numbness

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She’s becoming numb but doesn’t fully know it. What she does know is that things don’t feel as good as they once did. She doesn’t feel as though her intention is meeting the world in the way that she desires. She digs out a book written by her mother, who she has not seen in years. The dedication inside the front cover reads “…try to turn your words into actions”.

This is Angèle, the focal point of the film Whatever Happened To My Revolution, played by the film’s writer-director Judith Davis.

There is no doubt that Angèle is passionate. She is an urban planner, wanting to radically change the built environment of her adopted city, Paris, in order to improve the wellbeing of its citizens. She is not a stranger to political activism, being a member of political parties in the past and regularly getting involved with radical activism.

But now something feels missing for her. Activism doesn’t seem to be changing much, she struggles to maintain the bonds in her relationships, her career isn’t going in the direction she might have hoped, her blossoming new love interest seems unable to penetrate her icy exterior.

Amidst her continuing emotional turmoil, Angèle is working on an extensive freelance design project for the redevelopment of an area of urban sprawl on the edge of Paris and is incredibly passionate about the work. She believes that nurturing community in cities is crucial to improving society as a whole. Her idea – to connect two long, centuries-old boulevards that have become separated in the twentieth century by a huge expressway surrounded by dour high-rise blocks – is radical in its overt simplicity. The plan to join these long boulevards together and place shops, community facilities, nurseries and cafes either side – will, in Angèle’s vision, produce one long continuous avenue linking two areas of Paris together and naturally facilitate new community links between two currently segregated neighbourhoods.

Her plan could be seen as a way to begin to erase the boundaries of Paris that currently separate it from its radial banlieu both physically and in the minds of its residents. At a moment in history when borders everywhere – national, political, interpersonal – are growing higher, it’s exciting to see urban planning that pointedly strives to do the opposite.

It’s no coincidence that Paris is shown to be a hotbed of radical urban design in Judith Davis’ film. Radical and much needed concepts such as the ’15-minute city’ – beautiful in its cohesive simplicity – are actively being implemented there as an example to us all of the large-scale changes we can make to our cities and towns in order to meet the challenges that our civilisation faces.

The 15-minute city idea aims to adjust how our cities are structured so that almost everything we need to live a healthy, fulfilled life can be reached by a 15 minute walk or cycle from our front door. In cities that have been totally reshaped around the speed of the motor vehicle during the 20th century, this is far from a simple task, but it’s one that, if done with adequate care and thought, will greatly enrich the lives of many millions of people in the decades to come.

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By the end of the film, Angèle feels different; happier, a little less numb. She chooses to grasp the moment that she is in and commit to the man who is showing her love.

But what has happened to get her there? What has changed?

As well as grasping the thorn and choosing to reconnect with her estranged mother at her home in the countryside for the first time in a long while, it’s clear that her perspective has been changed by an emotional encounter with her brother-in-law while she is there, who, after a night of stress-induced drinking with the family, falls into an emotional rant attempting to defend his inhumane neoliberal ethics.

The ensuing emotion proceeds to annihilate any semblance of hard-fought serenity at the family reunion meal, but it’s important to recognise that, when all is said and done, everybody at that meal, despite the frayed emotions at the time, end up being better off for experiencing the catharsis and emotional transparency that the argument provides.

Afterwards, far from driving a wedge between them, the experience pushes Angèle to welcome her brother-in-law to the weekly group meeting that she organises for dispossessed and politically lost souls. They both seem happier, a little less numb.

Another thing to perhaps consider about that emotional encounter in the countryside, is that nobody went into the meal that night particularly wanting to be there (Angèle was incredibly apprehensive about seeing her mother for the first time in years and her brother-in-law only seemed to be there due to a feeling of familial obligation), and I’m sure nobody wanted or expected a huge emotional spectacle beforehand. And yet, it feels like everybody came out of it better off.

Often, being forced into interactions with different people we may not think we get on with is incredibly beneficial to us, in time fostering community and the roots from which society will eventually grow, therefore providing justification for Angèle’s work on bringing groups of diverse strangers together using urban planning.

Spencer

All things considered, Pablo Larrain’s latest offering to the world is a wonderful film, carefully treading its tightrope of subtly radical arthouse project and politically scathing, prim period piece to reach the other end of the high-wire more-or-less intact. Spencer is a fascinating film to watch for many diverse reasons.

But, this being a publication about architecture, the reason I bring up this particular film is that the filmmaker Pablo Larrain made a large, somewhat glaring creative choice during production which may just be unforgivable.

Almost every scene in the film is set on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. Being fairly famous in British culture due to its links to the royal family, it’s somewhat surprising that Larrain decided to use Schloss Nordkirchen, a palace in Germany that looks absolutely nothing like Sandringham House, to stand in for all of the extensive external shots of the famous house and estate.

Now, I’m in no doubt that there were severe production constraints, from financial limits, to barriers undoubtedly imposed on access to property owned by the House of Windsor and, admittedly, he seems to achieve exemplary accuracy in most other period details throughout the film. But when you set a film in an actual, existing, famous location and then choose to frame multiple long shots of supposed external views of said location, is it not unforgivable to use a completely different piece of architecture, built in a different era, hundreds of miles away?

Schloss Nordkirchen

Sandringham House

Gagarine

There was once a brisk utopian breeze blowing through the world of urban planning and civic architecture. In the decades after WWII, there was a cohesive will to make people’s lives better, with seemingly little exception. Some of the greatest creative minds of the time had fought through one, or even two, of the most catastrophically dire conflicts in human history. The expanded depths to which society was capable of descending was not only theoretically thinkable, but now viscerally real as the bloody battlefields were transferred from books and fireside storytelling to lived and heartfelt reality.

It should therefore be no surprise that, once WWII had ended, there was a conscious will sweeping through society to design and construct much better ways of living. Our collective eyes began to look up from the gutter and towards the stars.

It was in this context that the Cité Gagarine housing estate was thrown up on the southern fringes of Paris in the early 1960’s, capped off by a jubilant opening ceremony in 1963 starring the estate’s namesake himself, Yuri Gagarin, surrounded by starstruck young residents literally amazed by the prospect of standing within a few metres of a man who had travelled into space.

The film Gagarine opens with crisp, electric archive footage of that very ceremony and it all feels a little overwhelming, the Soviet cosmonaut stepping out of a car surrounded by bright new beautifully-designed tower blocks capable of providing comfortable housing for thousands of these awe-filled people we can see crowding the balconies and walkways on screen.

The next scene then switches to the same location in the present day where Cité Gagarine is now a fast-decaying shadow of its former self – lifts not working, broken lights in communal corridors, graffiti-laden walls, gangs dealing drugs in the lobby. The resident’s consensus seems to be that, despite some calling the place their home for several decades, the situation has simply deteriorated beyond the point of no return; the time has come for the entire estate to be demolished. The local council seems happy to oblige, no doubt incentivised by property developers waiting in the wings like bloodhounds, smelling a windfall investment from the other side of the globe.

The best films usually take great care to create interesting characters with deep sumptuous texture to each of their personalities. Gagarine is no exception, and straight off the bat, the main character Youri is presented in the first few minutes of the film as an introverted but deeply spirited young optimist who simply will not accept the conclusion that the building must be condemned to a fate of demolition.

Instead, Youri works each and every day, with the occasional help of his close friends and neighbours, to try and slowly repair and patch-up the buildings infrastructural problems the best he can without any of the professional or state help that a job of that size really requires.

Youri is a solarpunk. The very first scene where he is introduced shows him gently watering a plant beside his bed using a plastic drinks bottle. This is a foreshadowing of scenes later in the film where his love for plants, growth and permaculture is catalysed into the construction of an entire indoor hydroponic setup, producing a huge array of luscious fruit and vegetables – all for the sheer fun that such nurture brings.

We soon follow him up onto the rooftop of the building – clearly a place that is meant to be off-limits to the residents – where he has set up a small workshop, different sized spanners neatly arranged for ease of access, small piles of electrical components and soldering irons. There are even pieces of meteorological equipment and the odd bit of scientific apparatus suggesting that Youri even sees the space as somewhat of a science lab.

But this is not just a place of work, old sofas and comfy chairs next to the workbenches classify it as a place of relaxation and enjoyment too. It’s a place of joy, repairing not only the old decaying components of the apartment building which him and hundreds of others call home, but repairing the frayed and stressed psyches of him and his neighbours too.

This way of living, amidst the push for wilful destruction by neoliberal developers simply wanting to make huge sums of money with no concern at all for the people who call the estate their home, is nothing short of revolutionary.

Whether he consciously realises it or not, Youri’s efforts to repair, replace and retrofit, pushing back against the forces keen to simply demolish and start again, are incredibly radical and vital in todays world. Not just because of the personal joy and deep community that such a stance produces, but, when 20% of global CO₂ emissions are a direct result of the steel and cement industries, we simply cannot afford to keep demolishing and rebuilding structures, losing all of the embodied CO₂ in the process. Switching to a world that continuously repairs, refurbishes and retrofits its buildings instead is crucial.

The most radical thing about the film however is not the way it weaves the rich tapestry of its human characters, but is perhaps the subtle way it presents the building itself as the overarching character of the story.

When a building is older than any of its residents, when it’s the location that they spend the vast majority of their lives, when decades of events in all of their embodied richness and emotional meaning occur within its walls, when the very atmosphere of a building is intimately shaped by the people living within it – then we must understand that the building takes on a deep gravity of its own that cannot simply be dismissed as cold hard concrete and steel.

Buildings -places- mean something extremely profound to the people that inhabit them. And it is perhaps this that is the strongest message of the film. We cannot take buildings for granted, they are a part of us just as much as our friends and family, and should be cared for and preserved with just as much sincerity.

The Congress

Actress Robin Wright lives in a converted aircraft hanger, at least she does in The Congress, an entirely fictionalised depiction of her life by director Ari Folman.

Living a seemingly fulfilled existence with her reserved, flight-loving son and effervescent daughter, they eat meals together as a family around a large dining table which sits in front of an enormous picture-window overlooking an operational airport. Their home has clearly had an abundance of love and thought put into its beautiful, almost Scandinavian, extreme open-plan design. The intermittent deafening noise of low-flying aircraft is juxtaposed sensorially by the warmth and cosiness of the house, filled, but not overstuffed, with high quality furniture; hanging lamps, wooden bookcases rammed with dense tomes, large cushions scattered where there is space.

In short, a carefully balanced family home that fulfils the needs of its occupants, despite their wildly hectic lifestyles.

But something is clearly not right for Robin, straight from the off. Her friend and lifelong agent played by Harvey Keitel pays her a visit bringing news of an important meeting with the head of a leading Hollywood film studio.

Robin and her agent take a trip to Miramount Studios to see the studio boss where we experience the first layer of reality peeled away in what will prove to be a continuous process over the course of the film. Here, as we ourselves are watching a movie, we enter the labyrinthine palace of movie production, Miramount Studios, filmed at the historic Paramount Studios with its iconic early-20th century Hollywood studio architecture. Built in the first decades of the last century, the main administrative buildings of the Paramount Backlot were designed to blend in to the L.A. surroundings of the era, while still demonstrating a subtle Art-Deco boldness befitting the ambitions that the powerful Hollywood studios once embodied.

These enormous L.A.backlots were once seen to contain magical buildings, dream-factories where truly unbelievable feats of artistic genius were crafted in order to light up screens the world over.

Inside, Robin finds that a very different type of magical machinery now lies within and eventually submits to the ultimate Faustian pact, having her likeness scanned into the digital ether in exchange for a huge chunk of cash and the freedom of retirement.

The super high-resolution scanner invented for the task is housed within a giant geodesic dome, a strangely unintuitive but surprisingly versatile three dimensional shape popularised by R. Buckminster Fuller in the mid-20th century and since used to build super-sturdy structures all over the world.

Once the story has skipped forward twenty years, Robin Wright is given an anonymous – but apparently conventional – hallucinogenic drug that allows the user to enter a new constantly-changeable state that is shared with other individuals who have also taken the drug. We find ourselves in a futuristic corporate mega-hotel built in the shape of a giant cruise ship. But even stranger – the film switches from live-action to animated in order to emphasise the fact that what we are seeing is (at least partially) inside the mind of Robin Wright.

It feels as though we’ve entered a whole new dimension of spacetime.

What’s so exciting about this switch to animation is the boundless freedom it gives the filmmakers to present radical architectural aesthetics that are not really possible when you only have physical sets at your disposal.

Some of the internal spaces inside the giant cruise ship hotel are incredibly beautiful and it’s hard not to imagine it would have taken impossibly large volumes of time and money to build the equivalent sets on physical sound-stages.

The long wooden corridors inside the hotel have a distinctive Art Deco look which fits well with the nautical aesthetic, including huge round porthole-like windows and highly-polished wood surfaces.

The way that these particular scenes are lit by a gentle, soft sunset also reminds us just how beautiful polished hardwood can look when bathed in the soft light of the sun – a fact well worth reminding those architects today whose modern obsession with cold plain wall coverings appears to have become zealously addictive.

There is one particular small set in this section of the film which really helps to illustrate what I believe to be one of the key foundations of effective architecture – an effective sense of scale. In the short scene, Robin Wright leaves her hotel suite and walks down a corridor directly outside the room. There’s nobody else around, as is often the case in hotel corridors, but the corridor is bathed in warm natural sunlight from huge round windows, which is probably more unusual.

But right in the middle of the corridor lies a small rounded nook – a quaint little tobacco stall manned by a single member of the hotel staff.

Small tobacco kiosks are not particular rare in large cities of course, what I believe makes this one so aesthetically remarkable however, is the utilitarian scale of its placement in respect to its surroundings. A permanently-manned kiosk in such a sparsely-frequented corridor means something. Its planners intend to provide a service that they feel needs to be provided for the pure good of its patrons, regardless of economic profitability or resource efficiency, just as does a well-equipped hospital in a small town, a decent service station on a lightly-used road, or a fire station in a tiny village. It’s not the facility in-and-of itself that’s noteworthy and beautiful, but it’s placement with respect to the scale and needs of its surroundings.

I’ve seen many small examples of this over the years – a tiny coffee kiosk on the platform of an underused railway station, a drinking fountain in a quaint narrow backstreet, a stylish toilet block on a hiking trail deep in the countryside, miles from the nearest village – each and every one beautiful in its own way.

As the film continues to present radical aesthetic designs, it begins to explore the fascinating, infinite, fertile zone in which architecture and the human mind are inseparably enmeshed.

When it comes to the construction of architecture, we are obviously limited by the time and physical resources required to manifest the visions of our mind onto physical space, but what would it mean if we no longer required large amounts of time and resource-intensive materials to manifest those ideas? What if we could easily manifest our most radical design ideas onto a shared virtual sandbox world instantly with nothing more than our will alone – cities constantly morphing, growing and shrinking into new shapes, forms and ways of being, based on the needs and aesthetic will of it’s shared inhabitants.

There are wonderful, vibrant scenes in the film which subtly broach this way of being that is so radically hard to imagine for us resource and time restricted creatures.

In the final third of the film, there’s a distinct design aesthetic presented by the film’s virtual world (now around forty years after the events at the beginning of the film).

The aesthetic is overtly stylised in order to stand out and communicate the tone that the filmmakers wish to present, but it’s also subtly beautiful in a slightly understated way, often presenting its design flourishes in the background of shots, with a soft focus and pastel shades. Influence is clearly drawn in part from the mysterious works of 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch.

It’s also hard not to think of the Solarpunk movement when looking at many of the shots in this latter part of the film. The soft, unobtrusive, pastel plant-shapes that are embedded into the city have a subtle feminine feel to them, and when combined with art-nouveau design elements, the film begins to feel like one of the most radical cinematic examples of an aspiring Solarpunk cityscape – a rewilded environment that somewhat restores the balance between human endeavour and the needs of a vibrant, diverse natural biological ecosystem.

The filmmakers have clearly thought long and hard about the various design aesthetics depicted, and I believe it’s no coincidence that — in a story-world where ego has been mostly sidelined, in order to create an environment where people’s innate desire to be who and what they want results in live instantaneous production of the physical manifestations of these desires — what we end up with is a very plant-heavy, flowing, natural, Solarpunk cityscape.

Near the end of the film, Robin visits a virtual alternate version of Berlin’s old Tempelhof Airport in search of her son who harbours a deep passion for flight. Again, as with the rest of this curious, alternate future virtual-world, the set has the familiar plant-based design aesthetic and serene pastel colour scheme.

However, there’s an intriguing irony to Tempelhof being depicted in such a way. It was constructed on the architectural wishes of a dictator. Its design intimately enmeshed in the totalitarian vision of violent empire with which it was created. Tempelhof was designed to be a key part of a brand new capital city – one fit to be the centrepiece of an entire empire – and was intended to become a showpiece aerodrome stadium capable of seating one million spectators for parades of military might, as well as providing miles of wide underground tunnels that could be used as factories to manufacture machines of war.

This vast, sweeping structure then, is a constant physical reminder of some serious architectural questions; can a building ever be wrenched away from its original intended use? Despite extensive retrofit and the considerable passage of time, lives and governments, can a building constructed with dark, nefarious intentions be pulled into the light and transformed into a building of positive utility for new generations?

Keeping these questions in mind, you would have to admit that the juxtaposition between the airport’s original design purposes and the new soft Solarpunk aesthetic depicted in the alternate world of the film is therefore particularly striking; one might even say utopian.