A Film is Not a Building

Dodge House, LA designed by Irving Gill, photograph by Marvin Rand, Library of Congress

Film screening and book viewing: July 17-25, 2021

Conversation: July 25 at 10am PDT / 7pm (19:00) CEST online

“A Film is Not a Building” surveys three films on four buildings, each one a modernist house.

The subjects are: Irving Gill’s 1916 Dodge House, in Los Angeles; the 1929 Warsaw residence designed by Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca; and the Migishi Atelier and the Bunzo Yamaguchi House, in Tokyo, designed by Iwao Yamawaki and Bunzo Yamaguchi, respectively, in the 1930s and ‘40s. The filmmakers are: writer, Esther McCoy; artist, Susanne Bürner; and architect and professor at the Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Verena von Beckerath, in collaboration with colleagues Niklas Fanelsa, Momoko Yasaka, Maximilian von Zepelin, and Jens Franke—themselves artists, architects, designers, and filmmakers.

The program looks at the way these building films are used to understand, record, and transmit an experience of architectural space.

Present to discuss the work on July 25:

Susan Morgan, editor of Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, will talk about McCoy’s film, a film which Morgan, in turn, saved.

Artist Susanne Bürner will discuss architects Lachert and Szanajca, their building, and her film project, “A House of One’s Own–Me and My Neighbors”.

Verena von Beckerath will present the “Two Houses” research project.

Artist and curator Kate Brown will join the discussion.

Conversation available at https://watch.eventive.org/afilmisnotabuilding/play/60ea003ed6aece0053d6a025

Program curated by Kate Brown.

Ticketing for A Film Is Not a Building: Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, at

https://watch.eventive.org/afilmisnotabuilding/play/60e7e1a1a748f1008d80a296

Bios

Susan Morgan has written extensively about art, design, and cultural biography. With artist Thomas Lawson, she co­edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an alternative art publication produced in New York throughout the 1980s. A former contributing editor at Interview, Mirabella, Elle, and Metropolitan Home, Morgan has also been a longtime contributor to the photography journal Aperture. In addition to authoring artist monographs, profiles, and essays, Morgan edited and introduced Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (East of Borneo Books, 2012) and, with Kimberli Meyer, Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, co-curated Sympathetic Seeing (2011), the first exhibition about the groundbreaking work of writer and social critic Esther McCoy.

Esther McCoy (1904–1989) was a gifted literary stylist, acerbic social critic, and one of America’s foremost architectural writers. McCoy recognized the Western roots of American modernism and witnessed the birth of mid-century design. As Reyner Banham, the ebullient Englishman who successfully hybridized architectural history and cultural critique, observed: “Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California, what is was like, how good it was, if it even existed. Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and suddenly—California architecture had heroes, history, and character.” That milestone publication – for Banham and a continually widening audience—was McCoy’s classic Five California Architects. “It was clear that she knew her stuff, was a real scholar, though she seemed to belong to no known academic faction or school of thought, and could write,” he declared. “The book was so damned readable it was in a different league than most architectural literature.”

McCoy’s prolific career had started out in the progressive circles of Greenwich Village during the 1920s and went on to flourish in the West for nearly 60 years; her six published books about architecture are regarded as “a Balzacian cycle,” an unfolding epic of the figures, ideas and issues populating a significant American scene.

Susanne Bürner is based in Berlin working in photography, film and artist books. Over a wide range of subject matter, Bürner explores the psychological dimensions of images, directing the viewer’s attention to questions of presence and absence, as well as to the projection of the viewer herself. Architecture plays a key role in her work as the human attempt of structuring space and society, as a method and attempt of ordering life.

Verena von Beckerath is an architect based in Berlin and a co-founder of the architecture firm Heide & von Beckerath. She pursued studies in sociology, art theory and psychology in Paris and Hamburg and studied architecture at TU Berlin. She was teaching and research assistant at UDK Berlin and visiting professor at TU Braunschweig. She held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and at the German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo and was visiting professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Since 2016, she has been a professor of architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar where she holds the Chair of Design and Housing.

Niklas Fanelsa is an architect and founder of the architecture practice Atelier Fanelsa in Berlin and Gerswalde. He studied architecture at RWTH Aachen and Tokyo Institute of Technology. After his studies he worked for De Vylder Vinck Taillieu in Gent and TBBK in Berlin. He was teaching and research assistant at RWTH Aachen University, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2019/20, he was emerging curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal.

Momoko Yasaka studied scenography, display and fashion design at Musashino Art University Tokyo and architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. During and after her studies she worked for Heide & von Beckerath and Studio Karin Sander in Berlin. She was co-editor and co-curator of Horizonte – Journal for Architectural Discourse and Horizonte – Lecture series and graduate assistant at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Currently she is working for Weyell Zipse in Basel. 

Maximilian von Zepelin studied architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. During his studies he worked for Jägnefält Milton in Stockholm. He was co-editor and co-curator of Horizonte – Journal for Architectural Discourse and Horizonte – Lecture series. He was graduate assistant at Archiv der Moderne and at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Currently he is working for Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin in Zurich. 

Jens Franke lives and works as an artist in Berlin. In 2014 he completed his studies at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in the classes of Jeanne Faust and Thomas Demand. His films have been screened at Kasseler Dokfest, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Bundeskunsthalle, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof among others. His work focuses on topics concerning architecture and urban planning. A number of film projects have been realised in collaboration with architects. 

Kate Brown is an artist and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. A programmer with Los Angeles Filmforum, she recently hosted Babette Mangolte for two screenings, in 2019. In 2018, Brown made a film on Marcel Breuer’s last building, the Atlanta Central Library. She is working on a book on the same subject, now. She received an MFA in film from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA in landscape studies from Harvard.