The portrait of architecture and the architecture of portraits are the two themes that dance and blend in the photographs of Francisca Riviero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea, an artistic duo from Mexico City that, since 2005,have been translating into pictures the emotional interpretation of spaces. The two use formats and techniques that provide a personal and intimate perspective on the buildings they capture with a powerful eye; a modus operandi that found its higher expression in the recent show Paparazza Moderna at Vitra Design Museum between February and July 2019 – the first European exhibition of Lake Verea.
Ten movies about architecture, selected by the Mexican duo Lake Verea
The paparazzas of architecture lead us through a list of films that, layer by layer, reveals and unveils the meanings of privacy and intimacy.
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- Elisabetta Donati de Conti
- 16 May 2020
In a work that took 7 years from 2011 to 2018, the great modernist icons were portrayed in their everyday simplicity, without the “editorial make up – as they were doing last February while shooting Philip Johnson’s Glass House in full moon. So it is no surprise that also in their cinematographic tastes they have a special consideration for architectural voyeurism. Also in the following movies, the house is often a tool and a vehicle of indiscreet looks from neighbours, passers-by and lovers, as well as of obsessive habits fostered by owners, of unavowable desires and of collective utopias.
Set in 2026, this great German movie is about the narration of a human condition, in which individuals are easily manipulated. Here the collectivity lives in a situation where the blurry line between the personal, intimate, private space and the public one, completely disappears.
In parallel, also this cult movie by von Trier takes place in a scenario where you can see the inside and the outside at the same time, because there is no difference between them. In Metropolis the characters were moving all in compliance to whatever the leader was saying, and also in Dogville the individality vanishes in front of the gossip and the behaviour of the flock. Inhabitants are poor and frightened, grouped together in a small community they cannot leave - or are afraid to leave - because for all intents and purposes there is no “outside”, just as is happening to us at this time.
In Beetlejuice, one of the most irreverent and witty movies about ghosts, the living and the dead come together in a house that acquires a strong personal and subjective value: when the characters try to get out of it, they find the void. There is no outside and everything happens inside the home. The entire story takes place within a play of scales and small models that emphasize the comic side of the film; at some point they even draw a door in a desperate attempt to create a space through which to reach an imaginary elsewhere.
The same dynamics can be traced in this incredible story in which a group of Mexican friends from the middle-class meet in a mansion for an elegant dinner, during which the servants leave and only the butler stays on. The characters are stuck inside the big and luxurious dining room: no one can get in and no one can get out. In a succession of events, this black comedy brings to light the facets of the composition of a society forced in the same space - a space that is so powerful that it is impossible to imagine a place outside of it.
Biographical movie based on the novel Flores Raras e Banalíssimas by Carmen Lucia de Oliveira, it tells about the construction of a depéndance for the poet Elizabeth Bishop, by the female architect Lota de Macedo Soares in the property that she shares with her partner. A beautiful movie that, on one hand narrates from a feminine perspective the creation of an intimate and personal space; on the other hand the quest of a woman to reach independence. Our favourite part is when Lota designs the studio for Bishop to write, a part where architecture becomes an extension of the inner personal need to be safe in the world - the opposite of what happens in the other male-driven films of this selection, in which private and public constantly overlap.
This is an Argentinian movie in which architecture becomes the reason for a conflict between a sophisticated architect who lives in the Curutchet House - designed by Le Corbusier - and his neighbour, a boorish second-hand car seller who wants to open a window in his house in order to get more light. But this opening would let him look inside the Curutchet House, already a destination for nosy onlookers. The Man Next Door is a movie that touches us close because of this paparazzi theme: whenever the owner opens a door, there are people with cameras - just like us.
Nathaniel Kahn makes this travel through the architectures of Louis Kahn, to get to know better the father whom he never met - because of a relationship with a mistress. It is a documentary that uses buildings to decipher the architect and the man behind them - along with his dreams, difficulties and pursuits. For great fans of Kahn like us, it is a shock going through this path with the director, discovering the personality of an architect who, with architecture, loses his contact with people and messes up all the time with budgets and timings to follow his visions. But who, at the end, puts all of himself in order to create these masterpieces.
For us Parasite was a surprise because at the end we noticed that the entire movie revolved around two families that would like to live in this amazing house where most part of the movie takes place. A house that is perfect, with a living room that would be perfect on the cover of a magazine, a kitchen that is connected with all the other areas, the light that enters so delicately and the nature that comes inside. No one in this film wants to be richer, but just to live in there, following an ideal of beauty and freedom that goes beyond every other space that they experienced before. An architecture that is so beautiful whereas the house is so infested.
The interiors of the Hatfield House, where this prize-winning movie was shot, reflects the most personal aspects of Queen Anna, main character of the movie who finds herself in the middle of a plot that is a vortex of subterfuges, secrets and betrayals. The scenes are often set in a long tunnel that represents the passage towards intimacy - an intimacy that lays behind the door of the Queen’s bedroom, the only place where she can be the crazy one. The big room, the servants’ quarter, the Queen’s quarter and the public area are all connected through these corridors. Another fascinating thing for us in The Favourite is the use of the fish-eye, a kind of lens that allows to see everything that takes place in a room, but at the same time everything gets distorted. This device made us think of Luis Barragàn who used to place a glass sphere in a corner of every room so that he could look at its reflection.
In a dark and crowded future (November 2019) that does not look like our present, architecture is manipulated in order to fit this dystopian imaginative future of Maya-ish architectures, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House and a tiny apartment in an idealized Los Angeles. But in this future no one owns a personal electronic device, televisions are still huge boxes and technology is so slow. We are analog girls who grew up with this kind of future in our minds, but this movie gives us the opportunity to understand how different times and eras can give us a different idea of what our cities could be like in the future: today no one is building pyramids and no one could have imagined that the future in 2020 would have looked like a revival of nature.