Johan's Book of Space

 

 [Image: cartoon by Jimenez Lai]

At the end of his presentation at Constructing Knowledge Jimenez Lai describes a project or ambition to leave the frames out of his cartoons and let the pages become actual architectural sections – I'm looking forward to seeing future works coming from Lai.

[Image: Book of space, 2009, Johan Hybschmann] 

The image of the frame as the section made me think of a project of architect, Johan Hybschmann who graduated from the Bartlett in London this summer of 2009. In his thesis project the section is a frame, well actually a lasercut perspective image. Hybschmann created an entire book with images lasercut in each page forming a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark. I'd love to see the work irl, it's introduced beautifully here.

Johan once offered me to use the alias Louis Beton (Beton means concrete) which he came up with. Obviously a pun on a certain producer of high end bags. The name also suggests an ambiguity or bastard features that comes when mixing a brand name of a highly exclusive image with that of concrete - the most mondane building material of them all - bound with a cultural image as heavy as - well yeah...

Imagine a House - the movie

[IMAGE: STILL FROM IMAGINE A HOUSE BY JOANNA ZAWIEJA, 2007]

Joanna Zawieja is a Polish/Swedish architect whose contribution to the conference was a movie screening and a poster about the movie. The 14 minute long movie Imagine a house - investigating narratives of domesticity (2007) was Joanna’s thesis project from the KTH.

Joanna writes this about her movie: “Taking the emergence of the bourgeois interiors in the 19th century and its image-based condition as a starting point, this video looks into the making of the modern home during the early days of British industrialisation. An empty house in East London is the scene. 
   A story of Victorian domesticity is played out in the house where fallen women are trained in the art of homemaking and working class men are taught political consciousness.
   By dissolving the distinction between building and storytelling Imagine a House presents an act of rebuilding, where the story told by each repetition slowly transforms the abandoned house.” From www.joannazawieja.com 

The movie is beautiful and a nice patchwork of Joanna's voice telling historic facts from her research on the place; bustling sounds from the street; images model shots and stop motion animations. All put together as an intricate weave of before and now.

View the nice movie here in Quick time