Architects on Architecture; Êtes Vous Heureux?

 

With an invested interest in the domestic, both architectural and experiential, the Architects on Architecture installations aim to explore space not from a sculptural physicality but from the two-dimensional plane of film. The works utilise split screen and alternative aspect ratios to dissect the space within the filmic frame, allowing the context of the work - the failure of the International Style of Le Corbusier - to carry a distinct pathos in its image fragmentation. 

 

The French language films, self-consciously left untranslated for their English-speaking audience and precariously dubbed over the image of those not speaking the same language, perpetuate the miscarriage of understanding and inadequacy in translation of the architectural solutions used to house the mass of working class families beginning in the 20th Century and continuing to the present day. 

 

The idea of repetition; the family unit replicated a hundred times across multiple floors of a tower block, and the reductive nature of the aesthetic is intensified in the act of physically layering video onto buildings. A key element to the work is performance and installation. Video installations projected onto the outside of buildings are documented as film works in their own right, a cyclic layering process of filming and projecting begins. The line between art and documentation is blurred and the external walls of the exhibition space are brought in on themselves as they are projected on the inside of the gallery. In dialogue with Rowe and Koetter’s text Collage City, the works become a multi-dimensional collage, questioning the tensions between architecture and architect, architect and inhabitant, art and documentation, language and language barriers, utopian visions and failed dreams.