Lecture date: 1996-05-23
As a reference point for architects film is most commonly used as a more or less transparent architectural document of a given building or city. More insidiously, it exploits an explicit confirmation of our self-styled unique status – the camera can lovingly caress the banal more effectively than the most obsessional drawing. In opposition to this position, Katherine Shonfield gives a two-part lecture series using film to offer an insight into and an analogy for the professional activities, most specifically the pursuit of order. Contrasting two roughly contemporaneous films – the celebrated Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico and the controversial It Happened Here – she goes in search of a filmic understanding of one of the most powerful shifts in post-war British architecture: from modernist picturesque to brutalism.
NB: Begins abruptly. Stills from films are sometimes unclear.
