The architecture films that are a hit at MoMA

BarcelonaIla Bêka and Louise Lemoine have become the most important architectural documentary filmmakers of the last twenty years, with a body of work exceeding 40 films. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired their complete filmography, works collectively titled Living architecturesBecause they transgressed the conventions of architectural cinema by giving prominence to the workers, users, and inhabitants of the buildings. Now, the Catalan public has the opportunity to delve into their work thanks to the 9th edition of the International Film and Art Festival (Dart) (from December 10 to 14), whose program includes four of its films: Infinite happiness (2015) about the Casa 8 apartment block by Danish director Bjarke Ingels, will be shown on Saturday and Sunday at the Bosque cinema. And the other three, Koolhaas houselife (2008), Barbican (2014) and Tokyo Ride (2020), will be available on the CaixaForum+ platform from December 18 to January 18. "Each film is a bit of an adventure; they're all different. What they have in common is an encounter with someone, a human story," says Lemoine.

In this edition, the Dart Film Festival moves to the Bosque Cinema and will include 33 films, 24 of which are European or Spanish premieres. Among them are Art Spiegelman: Disaster is my muse. The sleeper: the lost Caravaggio, Mirrors, God is coming. and Warhol & Vijande. More than guns, knives and crosses.

Interestingly, although Bêka & Lemoine are two highly regarded designers, architects are not usually very enthusiastic about their work. "The way we work, or what we do, isn't very popular with architects, because we have a realistic approach. We don't try to please people at all. We can be very critical, and sometimes architects say: «oh la la“But why should I listen to these people criticizing what I’ve done, etc.?” There’s a lot of narcissism in the world of architecture, and what we’re trying to do is open up a more realistic approach to what architecture is and what social impact it has,” Lemoine explains. “That’s not what some architects want to see,” he adds. “They’re more interested in having good images of their building’s form, because that’s what they can control, whereas they can’t control what the grandmother who lives across the street might say.”

Chronologically, the oldest film is Koolhaas houselife, the first of the Living architectures and the film that brought them international fame. The protagonist is Guadalupe Acedo, the cleaning lady of the house Koolhaas designed for a couple with three children in Bordeaux. The house's unique feature is that Koolhaas custom-built it for the father, who suffered a serious car accident and became quadriplegic. Acedo has a love-hate relationship with the house, praising its technology but simultaneously complaining that it's difficult to clean. "Ila was making other films, fiction films, and I was finishing my studies. So it was really the first time we collaborated and considered how we could transform or propose a different way of working in the field of architectural cinema, inventing new methods for representing a building," says Lemoine. “That’s why we started it as a sort of summer project; we didn’t intend to embark on a twenty-year investigation or work in this field of architecture so intensely,” the artist explains. “But when we showed this film at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, it seemed so big to me, and the response was so overwhelming, that we felt we should continue investigating.” The reactions were extreme: “We received terrible reviews and extraordinary praise, so we thought the film touched on something important and sensitive,” Lemoine concludes.

Shortly after its completion, the French state listed the house, which meant that very few changes could be made after the owner's death. Thus, Bêka & Lemoine's highly personal work has also, in a way, become part of the heritage: "Koolhaas rethought, albeit slightly, the use or purpose of the platform he had designed, which wasn't a spectacle or an architectural demonstration, but rather a mobile room that allowed the owner to move vertically."

"When it was registered as a monument, the whole house was almost frozen in time," he adds. "But the film also proposes the idea that a monument has a backstory, a daily life full of complexities and difficulties." Following the Koolhaas house, they made a film at the Guggenheim Bilbao, focusing on the building's window cleaners, who must perform their work like climbers, suspended from ropes and harnesses. "One of the issues we were interested in exploring was the very contemporary notion of care in architecture and work, which had been completely forgotten and sidelined, and was considered taboo. So we tried to address it, also with humor and in a light and cheerful way," says Lemoine.

With the same intimacy as a diary

House 8 is the largest private housing development in Denmark, with approximately 60,000 m²² and about 10,000 m² of offices. The name comes from the shape of the blog, which is shaped like an eight. And London's Barbican, also transgressive in its time, is one of London's brutalist icons. The documentaries made by Bêka & Lemoine, The infinite happiness and BarbicanThese films, respectively, share the common thread of giving prominence to the inhabitants and being conceived as visual diaries of the month they were installed in the building. "The diary is the form of narration that is closest to personal experience. It's not necessary for us to appear in the film as characters, it's not necessary for us to appear on screen, but the diary format is the most personal, the most intimate," says Lemoine.

"These films seek nothing more than to convey an experience. They don't give you a truth, they don't tell you a historical story about a place, but rather they show you what Ila and I experienced during the months we lived there, and that has to do with perception, emotion, and..." “We are extremely careful to maintain a very personal, small-scale way of working, especially between the two of us, because we try to make very personal films. If you grow in scale, if you become a big team and arrive at a place transforming it just with your presence, adding lights and all your technical equipment around you, then it’s no longer the film,” he warns. “We want to respect each place with its internal characteristics; we try to be as unobtrusive as possible,” Lemoine concludes.

Instead, Tokyo Ride It is a road movie one day aboard the Alfa Romeo vintage by architect Ryue Nishizawa, the designer of works such as the Louvre-Lens Museum. The film arose from a coincidence: Bêka & Lemoine were in the city working on another film, and Nishizawa called them and said he could dedicate the following Tuesday to them. But he didn't know the couple wanted to make a film. "Our sensibility has evolved over the years and with practice; you learn by doing. And what we've learned making our films is how to approach people, how to treat them with more sensitivity, with more respect. I think what we've been doing for these twenty years is, really, learning how to relate to people," Lemoine concludes. "Our films are full of life stories of people we've met," he adds, "but perhaps at the beginning they were more humorous, sometimes a bit sarcastic. And increasingly we've tried to move towards something that perhaps delves deeper into psychology, that is more respectful."