If you are interested in architecture on film, there are a pair of directors who do it much better. They are called Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine, and they have produced an exceptional series of documentaries – Living Architectures – that provide a fascinating window on to the real lives of buildings, behind the idealised image. From following the daily trials of a cleaner around one of Rem Koolhaas’ experimental villas, to focusing on the climbing team charged with maintaining the billowing folds of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, their films unwrap the realities behind the icons, told by those who deal with them. And, as luck would have it, they will also be showing at the Barbican soon – the result of their month-long immersion in the brutalist complex, which promises to be an energising antidote to Wenders’ sickly-sweet eulogy, a caustic remedy to wash away the schmaltzy syrup.
Wim Wenders and a team of directors attempt to show ‘the soul of buildings’, from the Pompidou Centre to the most humane prison in the world, in 3D. But their sickly-sweet results feel more like a series of vapid promo videos
Several years in the making, the film, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican tonight, is the product of six acclaimed directors, each of whom have chosen a different major building to put on the psychiatrist’s couch and delve deep into its subconscious. From the Berlin Philharmonic to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the half-hour shorts explore a day in the life of these cultural machines, narrated by the imagined voices of the buildings themselves. It is a voyeur’s dream, taking you behind the scenes after hours and from behind closed doors, in a format that puts the architecture – usually just a filmic backdrop – centre-stage.
Shot entirely in 3D, the project is partly intended as a manifesto for the medium, which Wenders insists has not seen its potential fully exploited, confined to action films and special effects. Since his maiden voyage with the technology in 2011 for Pina, a biopic on the avant-garde dance of Pina Bausch, he has been its biggest advocate, for the sense of “heightened immersion” and “real spatial experience” he claims it can allow.
For all its lofty ambition, Cathedrals of Culture presents a limited and internalised view of what architecture is, a fault perhaps driven by the obsession with the 3D camera. It is a tool that, rather than broadening the view, has brought a compressive, myopic lens. The context of most of these buildings is entirely absent, as is the bigger story about how they operate in the city. Instead, it is an indulgent, naval-gazing exercise in spatial pornography, choosing visual titillation over giving the full picture. And if the grandiose pronouncements of architects sometimes make you suspicious of architectural culture to begin with, this film will do little to help. It has a self-satisfied, sometimes cultish, air that makes you feel like you’re taking part in some collective brainwashing exercise.