With its rusted Corten steel canopy thrusting out over the pavement like the roof of an oversized petrol station, the GAM cultural centre is an arresting sight on the streets of Santiago de Chile. But it is even more remarkable when you learn that this gargantuan shed, and the 22-storey tower that looms behind it, was summoned into existence in just 275 days by a frenzied army of volunteer builders in the 1970s, since when it has been seized, occupied, converted, burned to the ground and, recently, reborn.
This eventful life is colourfully documented in Escapes de Gas (Gas Leaks), the opening film in the inaugural ArchFilmFest London, a week-long jamboree of architectural films that promises to shine a spotlight on the secret lives of our cities.
Santiago’s ambitious brutalist complex was conceived by Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende as the venue for the third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) in 1972. Designed as the ultimate piece of physical propaganda, it was to be a living monument demonstrating what Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist government could achieve. In Allende’s words, it was “a symbol of the passion and devotion Chile is willing to contribute towards shaping a new mankind”.
The documentary reveals how the building was imagined as a showcase of Chilean art, mobilising more than 30 artists, who designed everything from embossed bronze doors and globular glass light fittings to wicker fish mobiles and an elaborate kitchen ventilation shaft shaped like a jagged tree.
“This is a collective work,” declared Félix Maruenda, the magnificently bearded sculptor of the tree chimney, “the beginning of a future where art will be available for the mass audience and not just in the living room of an expensive mansion.” As he said in a TV interview at the time, the question concerning him and his fellow politicised artists was: “How can sculptors and painters be of public use, like bakers?”
Just one year later, the building took on a radically different role. Standing in the very spot where Allende had addressed the gathering of world leaders with his democratic vision, general Augusto Pinochet declared martial law and ushered in the repressive rule of his military junta, which would hold power for the next 17 years. His soldiers stripped the halls of their abstract socialist art and ringed the complex with a high-security fence, anointing it as the new home of the ministry of defence. As a labourer who had worked 24-hour shifts to see Allende’s vision built recalls: “Destroying art – and, most of all, destroying art made by your own country – was wiping out the nation and its culture.”
The film follows the original architects’ and artists’ quest to recover the missing artwork, and charts the building’s eventual restoration and conversion in 2010, after an “accidental” fire gutted it in 2006. In doing so, it reveals the multiple complex and intertwined lives to which a single building can play host, unpicking a layered palimpsest of hopes and dreams, plots and counterplots. The Unctad building makes for an even more fitting case study, given that it is the place where the idea for ArchFilmFest was spawned.
“Buildings have become so anodyne,” says festival founder Charlotte Skene Catling, who met co-founder Manuel Toledo at the cultural centre in 2013, when it was hosting Santiago’s own ArqFilmFest, which Toledo also co-organises. “Architecture is capable of creating unbelievably powerful emotional experiences, but it is film-makers who are exploring this territory in a way that architects seem to have forgotten how to.” Part of the aim of the festival, she says, is to merge the two disciplines, prompting us to reimagine the way buildings and spaces might be conceived and built.
Taking over the atmospheric Bargehouse, a former meat-packing factory behind the Oxo Tower on London’s South Bank, the festival packs in 60 hours of screenings a day (mostly free or £2 on the door, first come, first served) with a voraciously broad programme. There are plenty of classics, such as Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, along with cult favourites including Los Angeles Plays Itself and Koyaanisqatsi; a dedicated room of films by Julien Temple; as well as a competition of experimental shorts, drone films and installations showcasing ways that architects are using virtual reality and 3D scanning technologies to record and experience the built environment – including reconstructing the destroyed arch at Palmyra, Syria.
The ICA is hosting a related programme that includes a beguiling documentary on the Böhms, a family of German expressionist architects whose entangled domestic and work life in their multigenerational atelier reads like a Renaissance drama. The Böhms’ buildings – known for their sculptural concrete forms, most famously wrought in the mountain-like pilgrimage church at Neviges – barely feature. Instead, the network of emotional relationships that create these buildings is put under a microscope, telling a moving story of tyrannical patriarchy, fraternal rivalry and the fragility of love. It somehow humanises architectural practice in a way never before shown on screen.
Architecture and film have had a long and complex love affair, the latter for ever exploiting the spatial drama of the former, the former trying eternally to capture the contained emotional intensity of the latter. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who was a screenwriter before he turned to architecture, puts it: “The two professions – film-making and architecture – are very close. Both require a plot: you have to develop episodes … a kind of montage that creates interest and a sequence that gives the circulation, the path or the experience of a building a certain suspense.” From the Dutch embassy in Berlin, which gives visitors glimpses of hidden diplomatic workings as they ascend a continuous snaking ramp inside the building, to the theatrical sequence of foyer spaces at Casa da Música in Porto, the filmic imagination at work in Koolhaas’s practice has always been palpable. A recent biopic by his son, Tomas Koolhaas, sadly lacked the same intensity as the buildings.
“Both film and architecture are about having a vision in your head then trying to make it real,” says Toledo. “You have to use the same tactics, too – you must have a compelling story, find the money and convince a lot of people that it’s a good idea.”
Skene Catling, who taught a unit on architecture and film at the Royal College of Art, often makes short narrative films of her own completed buildings as a kind of cathartic exercise. “It’s very much about recovering from the trauma of doing the project,” she jokes. “It’s a moment where you can be autonomous again and recreate the sense of imagination, after dealing with the practicalities of litigious contractors or difficult clients. You can test whether the ideas that were there at the beginning of the project remain, or reveal things about the spaces you’ve created that you didn’t quite expect.”
- ArchFilmFest London is at the Bargehouse and the ICA, 6 to 11 June.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion