public art
Alfred Hitchcock on set for film 'rear window'
Celluloid cities
When you watch a film set in a city you know, you recognise some spaces, while others seem unfamiliar or changed. Films have witnessed extraordinary changes in the city: in its physical fabric, in its social conditions and in its cultural readings. Film has woven a tapestry of fictions around these familiar settings, giving them new meanings, reinforcing myths, and creating new myths.
Eventually, film constructs a new filmic city in parallel with the physical city, and sometimes the filmic city becomes more familiar to us. Some spaces, buildings, and settings are wholly fictional, built in the studio, and never existed; while others existed in the past and have long since disappeared. Some buildings remain and have become old familiar friends, recognisable in a street full of strangers.
As the city changes, in response to its current industry, commerce, transport requirements, recreations and entertainments, the filmic city remains, stored in the archives.
The camera moves from private spaces into public spaces and back – it is not hampered by thresholds of propriety. As architects, we work in similar ways: understanding and reinventing everyday places and rituals in space. Precision, observation, action and ultimately how people feel in those spaces is Paramount.
We call this process a studio of invisible architectures. We operate as the camera operates: partly recording, partly designing, always observing, and sometimes silent.
The invisible architecture studio presents…some old friends and some fictions.
Invited Assessor for Irish Arts Council Architecture Awards (for Research, Publications, Scholarships and Bursaries) (2001)
Member of ‘art in translation’ panel for Galerie Birthe Laursen, Paris, 2006
Open House, Dublin – showed organiser around London Open House, 2006 as research for Dublin event.
"Lost Spaces": The Sound of horses hooves in London, Mikhail Floros