Bartlett Think-Tank

In recent years, in Europe and beyond, there has been a trend toward the rehabilitation and redevelopment of waterfront areas. There were several reasons why these areas, which in the past often functioned as entry point to the city, fell into neglect. Amongst these, the the beginning of mass air travel, the redrawing of trade routes and subsequent relocation of commercial harbours. Between the nineteen-seventies and nineties, however, some successful examples as the London Docklands or the Barcelona Villa Olimpica, set the standard for waterfront regeneration programmes as a fast, photogenic and clearly business-oriented way cities could re-shuffle their image and attract foreign investment.

The Waterfront Expo in Glasgow on 2-3 November 2011 was an occasion to present three on-going programmes in three of Scotland’s five cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. It was also an occasion to compare these projects with other planned or ongoing experiences in other cities in Europe and Asia and discuss the challenges faced by the professionals working on them. At the conference the speakers representing public administrations clearly highlighted the economic and financial dimension of the projects, confidently assuming the targets stated in their plans are positively achievable and likely to bring wealth to neighbourhoods and wider urban areas. For instance, it is assumed that the Clydefront regeneration programme in Glasgow will bring about twenty thousand new jobs and an equal amount of new homes to the area, which is currently one of the neglected and deprived of the city. The Scottish Exhibition Centre, next to the actual venue where the conference took place, and the BBC Scotland Building were often cites as success stories. Interestingly, a similar enthusiasm was also shared by speakers coming from the development sector, while other private actors and representatives or the local community were more cautious in their forecast.

Amongst the most important questions that were asked was the question of accountability. With programmes projected to take place over a long time frame (ten to twenty years, much longer than the elected politicians’ terms) many asked who would be the ultimate guarantor that the original intentions and budgets. Someone raised the important issue of the fact that the introduction of proportional representation has weakened the decisional power of local councils, since every party involved in the administration of the city has to share the same vision. Other concerns generally touched on environmental issues, but also on the local economy of fishing, which would be disrupted by the programmes, with local fishermen having to relocate further away. Some of the criticisms, however, were actually endorsed by the councillors who were attending the conference. In particular, most seemed to agree that reducing the urban design intervention to the creation of small blocks of flats for young professionals interspersed by retail complexes had failed to built and consolidate a feeling of community in past interventions. The model of the mixed community, with people from different ages, professions and walks of life is more sustainable from a social and economic point of view in the long run. Also, for the same reasons, multi-functional buildings with spaces for small retail units should be preferred to residential-only structures.

The conference included extensive tours of the neighbourhoods which will be transformed by the regeneration programmes. Although connected by economical ties, the three Scottish programmes cover an extremely different range of waterfront areas, from Edinburgh were at the moment there is little connection between the city proper and the coastline, to Dundee, where the waterfront is projected to function as a new city centre. For this reason, the latter definitely seemed the most ambitious amongst the three — and also the most convincing. While in Glasgow and Edinburgh most of the effort seemed aimed at attracting foreign investment through development, in Dundee there was a clearly defined ambition to redefine the identity of the city — and in the process dramatically improve the quality of life for Dundonians. This ambition seem very likely to turn into a success, thanks to the very clever idea to invite the Victoria & Albert Museum to build a local branch and the London institution’s brave acceptance. The V&A centre will represent a much needed venue for travelling major exhibitions, which currently could not be hosted anywhere in Scotland. Also, the closeness to the University of Dundee and to Dundee Contemporary Arts centre leaves one with the impression that the emerging hub will have a true, positive impact on the identity of the city and its quality of life.

Interior of one of the townhouses looking toward the common backyard.

Running parallel to the back of each row of townhouses is a long subterranean corridor, cramped, artificially lit but still dark, with pipes and cables running through its length, moisture trickling down its unfinished concrete walls, it’s the mechanical and services spine of the block. Garbage cans are lined up at each door marking the otherwise inconspicuous switch to another home. At the end of the corridor is another door, this one leading to a series of hidden exterior steps running parallel to the blind exterior end wall of the townhouse row. If you are not looking for them, the steps, and those coming in and out, are indeed hard to see… Ni vu ni connu. Here the ideology of making a distinction between what is allowed to be seen and what should remain hidden is designed into a long corridor allowing for the covert movement of trash and extra-marital affairs.

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The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality.

Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

Forensic science and the production of truth. When the only subject that does not lie is the object.

Eyal Weizman is head of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and author of books like Hollow Land and The Least of All Possible Evils, in which the same meticulous critical methods are used to scrutinise built environments and cultural constructs. He is also the co-founder of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR), a Palestine-based collective that acts through its interventions on the architectural space and on the space described by international law. This is the transcription of a conversation between Gabriele Oropallo and Eyal Weizman about his current project on forensics. The conversation took place on June 18th, 2011 in the rural setting of the DAAR Architecture Rehab Camp organised by DAAR and Iaspis in the Stockholm Archipelago.

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Thanks to Ben Sweeting, PhD candidate in Architectural Design at the Bartlett, for his input on this post.

The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, vacuum packed.

Saturday 6th June 2011 saw the launch of the post-exhibition catalogue following up last December’s ‘Invisible Machines’ exhibition, held at Grand Parade in Brighton, which investigated the various relations between machines and architecture. Although the invocation of machines in architecture is well-trodden ground (dating back not just to modernism but to Book X of Vitruvius) the exhibition suggested that the many relations between architecture and machines have mostly been approached individually and proposed instead to attempt to discuss them in parallel.

To this end, curator Ben Sweeting assembled a group of exhibitors whose work relates to machines in quite different ways – from the physicality of Michael Wihart’s hydraulic devices and Tom Foulsham’s balancing installations to the abstract relationships of Tim Norman’s and Charlotte Raleigh’s drawings of the cosmos and bumblebees respectively.

The limited edition post-exhibition catalogue, which contained a selection of material from the exhibition, was assembled live at East London’s Redundant Architects Recreation Association and individually vacuum packed along with various small objects gleaned from the R.A.R.A. workshop. The event was accompanied by a BBQ as well as by the amplified sound of the vacuum packing machine. As R.A.R.A.’s Joe Swift points out, guests were left “with the conundrum of how to look at the fantastic images inside without disturbing the vacuum within this beautiful object”.

A pdf version of the catalogue will be made available next week, so be sure to check out http://invisiblemachines.wordpress.com/

Contributors: Michael Aling, Tom Foulsham, Ersi Ioannidou, Glenn Longden-Thurgood, Tim Norman, Charlotte Raleigh, Ben Sweeting, Michael Wihart

Dalgety Bay suburban castle

Now for something a little lighter. A recent trip to Scotland and a wrong turn into a suburb of Edinburgh brought us to this suburban gem,  a heroic reminder that yes, a man’s home is indeed his castle. It reminded me I had once thought of posting photos of two similar meaningful roadside architectural attractions sharing an uncanny relationship. The above is pretty much the clearest go-ahead nudge one could get.

'WE SPEAK', Château Madrid, Rang du Moulin Rouge just off highway 20

Château Madrid (pictured above) is located at what is approximately the geographical centre (measured in highway kms) between Québec City and Montréal, Canada. The roadside attraction was built in the 1960s into a hotel slash restaurant slash service station slash dinosaur and bigfoot fantasy park. The familiar castle-like form of the building, which has now comfortably lodged itself into the collective memory of every motorist travelling that stretch of the Transcanadian Highway, would have originated from the owners’ fascination with castles seen during a trip to Spain. The blatantly symbolic name of the place, now referred to as ‘Le Madrid’ rather than my childhood memory of ‘Château Madrid’, seems to confirm the rather specious connection. This is especially given the reference in a place which otherwise offers a vacuum of hispano-anything. One would be entitled, though, to understand the decision on symbolic geographical terms; Madrid is, after all, the symbolic geographical centre of Spain. But (if we were to take this interpretation seriously) the connection may have more to do with the real relationship between Spain’s highways (especially the national ones radiating from Madrid) and its castles (authentic in this case). Indeed a towering castle is a common sight from the roads to and from the Spanish capital. And in this case (if you compare with similar sights in France, for example) Spanish castles do have a certain ‘castleness’ je ne sais quoi.

But this is all in jest, after all, so why should the appropriation, commodification and consumption of someone else’s culture be one sided? Which brings us to the second attraction, this one from Spain (pictured below), where a genuine piece of architectural heritage has been crossed with the North American motel typology. The tower, which I am told is auténtica, is visible from the highway, and behind it stretches a series of ‘modern stables’: long arcades with generous arches wide enough to park an upgraded rental. To think of authenticity in both these cases (the Scottish example is instrumental, really, and so does not count) is a nice enough way to ponder over dead ends. The question might be: which achieves best what it claims to be, the hotel/motel wanting to be a castle or the castle wanting to be a hotel/motel?

The genuine, albeit lightly modified...

...and its backside car-ports.

By external contributor Deepa Ramaswamy.

A lot has been already said about the slums of Mumbai and their role within the city’s memory and identity. Dharavi, which is supposedly the largest of Mumbai’s slums, figures very prominently in most of these discourses. Dharavi has developed and expanded over the last few decades largely due to its central location within an otherwise very dense and expensive city, making it the preferred locus for migrant workers who relocate from all over the country to Mumbai, who either come to Dharavi and later move out of it, or alternatively live there permanently. Dharavi is thus defined by this constant state of displacement and flux, in the number of people, their living and working conditions and in its continuously altering edges with the city.

Within this organic and fluid urban condition, any attempts at mapping and documentation seems static and inert against an intrinsic transience. This has been evident since the announcement of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project by the State Government, which has led to an urgent demand for surveys, maps, recorded statistics and future projections, that are constantly being verified, revised and updated, making architecture’s engagement in Dharavi seem more like a tryst with numbers and their accuracy, operating outside of a larger design narrative.

Times of India, Mumbai Friday June 12th 2009

My interests in Dharavi are multilayered, but at this point I have been largely focussed on one particular predicament; any kind of intervention into its many complex and heterogeneous realities leads to an eventual confrontation with what I refer to as its ‘temporariness’. In reaction, the collection and organisation of information generates a grid of datums and constants that offer a fixity or permanence, connecting the disparities and more importantly, ultimately controlling the resultant responses.

For example, when faced with the enormous challenge of counting the exact number of households in Dharavi, the government had to deal with the problem of trying to figure out who exactly qualifies as a ‘permanent’ citizen of Dharavi, permanent enough to warrant a newly reallocated flats in the redevelopment. To resolve this issue, the year 1995 was considered as the datum point; wherein if you lived in Dharavi anytime before the year 1995 you are considered a bonafide resident of Dharavi. 1995 since has became a much debated datum, that in its arbitrariness has become an issue of dispute. Similarly, the size of the reallocated flat was decided to be an area of 300 sqft, a number that stems from area codes set up by the Slum Redevelopment Authority of Mumbai. 300 sqft is the size of every new flat irrespective of existing occupied areas, which has again been disputed given the organic nature of the current live-work areas.

These are but two examples, but hopefully they make the point. My interest in these abstract numbers and the ‘expert systems’ i.e organisations that control these numbers and their dissemination, comes as much from their ability to offer a finality within an otherwise constantly mutating situation, but also from their enormous ability to define the future directions for Dharavi, wherein the design narrative is essentially governed and constrained by these numbers and what they imply. The numbers are collated often with the use of self created normative standards, to then themselves become the normative in the future.

To come back to the original question, how does architecture begin to approach conditions of extreme organicity and informality?  Maps and statistics as tools are unavoidable, but how do you deal with a situations like Dharavi where one needs to reflect the organicism and ‘temporariness’ of a place without falling into the constant trap of data, their verification and amendment?

I understand these questions as just one aspect within the incredible complexity of working in Dharavi, but nevertheless significant.

Contributor’s bio: Deepa is an architect from Mumbai, currently based in Chicago. She recently completed her MA in Histories and Theories from the Architectural Association in London. Her current interests stem from examining architecture’s modes of production and representation, especially when they are determined by processes that organize and classify statistics to shape the perception and comprehension of the city. Deepa has a Masters in Architecture from the US and a Bachelors in Architecture from India.

Architect Paul Thomas (Jean-Louis Trintignant) seduces Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) in Les Biches (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1968).

‘You have a sense of real comfort,’ she says, standing on the quayside, as he pours two glasses of whisky.

Paul Thomas is an architect from Paris completing work on a housing development on the edge of a harbour near St Tropez. On that winter’s afternoon, he attempts to seduce Frédérique, an acquaintance from the area who he met the previous evening. The whisky and Thomas’s brooding charm prove intoxicating. The architect soon embraces his beautiful neighbour. Within an hour, the two are inseparable and embark on an intense relationship.

This scenario offers a rather glamorous picture of the everyday life of a successful architect. But once we realise this episode is taken from Claude Chabrol’s film Les Biches (1968), the situation is bound to take a darker turn.

Architect Paul Thomas is a manipulative playboy. The previous evening, Thomas didn’t seem to be interested in his dinner host Frédérique, but was instead intrigued by Frédérique’s protégée, a young woman named Why. At the end of the party, Why begged Thomas to take her home with him and he obliged without hesitation. The following morning, Why revealed to Frédérique that she loved Thomas. Jealous, Frédérique decides to confront the architect at his waterside development. At first, Thomas denied he spent the night with Why, before admitting he did, but that he didn’t even know the girl’s name. He forgets to meet Why for the date they had arranged for that afternoon and instead seduces Frédérique. Why is devastated to learn about Thomas and Frédérique, but suffers in silence until she finally decides to plot her revenge.

I don’t want to spoil the plot of the film, but, following Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht’s blog post in October 2010, I am intrigued by Chabrol’s representation of the architect.

Until the upheavals in the French education system in the late 1960s, all architects trained in the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. The French press and television once paid almost reverential respect to architects, and ordinary citizens would address an architect with the formal title ‘Monsieur l’architecte.’ In Chabrol’s film, cracks begin to emerge in the elite status of the architect. Thomas is not a venerable figure, or the winner of the Prix de Rome, but a manipulative character, driven by his desire for women and work.

The stature the architect in France began to crumble during the 1960s as a number of architects became implicated in property development scandals. If Paul Thomas were a real architect, he would perhaps have been a sympathetic colleague of Fernand Pouillon (1912-1986), another playboy and prolific architect of modernist housing in France, Algeria and Iran. During the late 1950s, tempted by a boom in construction and cheap government loans, Pouillon turned his efforts to property speculation and became embroiled in the infamous ‘Point du Jour’ scandal. In order to finance his lavish lifestyle, Pouillon embezzled deposits made by individual buyers for a luxury housing development on the banks of the Seine. Construction had to be abandoned as Pouillon defaulted on loan payments. He also owed 20 million francs in tax payments. In 1961, Pouillon was arrested and detained to await trial. During a stay in hospital, Pouillon escaped to Italy and was allegedly protected by the Algerian liberation front.

Around the same time, the popular press also began to express dissatisfaction with the architects designing large modernist housing blocks in the suburbs of French cities and harshly criticised the high-rise architecture emerging around Paris. Architects were no longer untouchable.

Even children were discouraged from wanting to become an architect. An illustrated children’s book from 1964 portrays an architect as a man fuelled by ambition, but cut off from the realities of ordinary life. It tells a story that would put off even the most gifted young scribbler from designing buildings:

Once upon a time (however it’s true), there was an architect who built houses and a family who was looking for a house. The architect consisted of a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian Ink. The family consisted of a father, a mother and two “so-where-are-those-dreadful-kids?”. The architect, of course, did not know the family. He built houses to show that, with a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian ink, he was the smartest architect of all. […] But the architect hadn’t thought about the people, and the people were bored in all this cement, all this glass and all this wind, in these large apartments that were all the same, which looked like cages piled up into the sky.

[Extract from Claude Roy and Alain Le Foll, C’est le Bouquet (Paris: Delpire, 1964). My translation.]

Representations of the architect in France during the 1960s put pressure on the image of a talented and sophisticated creator. The architect might still be glamorous, but he was becoming a villain. It was time for a new generation of architects, but the profession would remain for some time the domain of wealthy, white men.

Further reading:

Danièle Voldman, Fernand Pouillon: Architecte (Paris: Payot, 2006).

By external contributor Miguel Torres-Garcia.

Today we conceive urban space to have a substance of itself. Architectural proposals take part in it, and produce it to a certain extent, but I wonder if there are still areas beyond the discipline’s reach.  In this text I will use a few samples across time, starting by a comparison between two contemporary 17^th century paintings, as to exemplify the process that at the same time has shaped urban and public space, and articulated the understanding we have of them. It is my intention to show that far from being obvious, this issue has undergone a complex evolution throughout western modern history.

The first painting is Vermeer’s The Little Street, one of his two paintings – the other being View of Delft - having reached us that deals with the outdoors. In this work, Vermeer combines different elements of Delft’s cityscape – there is consensus in considering this composition an abstraction rather than an actual location – in order to describe the streets of Delft. Split almost in half, the composition juxtaposes a planar façade and a deep cityscape. Representative and functional relations between the house and the street are also shown together, on each side of the canvas’s symmetry axe. This shift between the symmetries of the objects within the painting and the painting itself, underscored by the painting’s crop, induces in the viewer an understanding of the greater order of the city’s fabric.

As the painter leans on his usual compositional schemes, he also continues his typical motifs, and thus the domestic scale is used to symbolically report the idea of the street. Vermeer’s everyday-life scenes of Dutch bourgeoisie are reflected in three instances around the painting: a maid at house-keeping chores, a couple of children playing and a woman sewing on the doorstep, so arrayed that all three of them appear somehow confined to the façade’s plane, and though having “one foot” on the street, absolutely belonging to the house.

The other painting is Martínez del Mazo’s depiction of the Alameda de Hércules, the main urban space arranged in Seville during the 16^th century. One characteristic establishes the main difference with Vermeer’s piece: the Alameda, the way it was conceived, had no formalized edges. Designed as something between a garden and an urban stroll in what used to be a floodable area hosting seasonal leisure activities, its rationale was the inception of an intrinsic order rather than an external one. This was to be granted by a combination of a perspective array, landmarks and a strong conceptual content.

Thence the pictorial representation –the first of a series of copies that repeated the same scheme- of its spatial quality is based on this kind of backbone, but it does also rely strongly on the depiction of characters hovering over space, loosely bound to this built structure. Their attires, attitude and characterization are stressed so that they can both be recognizable in themselves and qualify the space they are occupying. Urban space is revealed in simultaneity; in the coexistence of the water boy, the strolling gentlemen, the dueling ruffians… in an incoherence that Vermeer avoids in his painting. Witness of the awakening of a new social order, Vermeer’s analytical eye feels comfortable within the boundaries of the domestic realm, in which bourgeoisie first expressed itself spatially. But the streets remained a backward, hostile world, still to be apprehended by a middle class on its way to the Enlightenment, and which for the moment merely leaned out and dared to inhabit a thin border fringe. The features of the public space at reach of Vermeer’s pictorial discourse are those around it. There is no description of the street as such, but rather of how it is approached from its edges.

Proposal for a Cenotaph for Newton by E. Boullée (1784) and E.G. Asplund’s Stockholm’s City Library (1928). Two key moments in the Enlightenment’s project of the “indoor public space”.

At the beginning of the consolidation of the modern city, the actual streets took place in spaces in between edges that set boundaries and bodies than enacted similitude or difference. Then the developing urban ideal gradually conquered the space that had belonged to the indistinct crowd. If classicism had spawned an awareness regarding a necessary negotiation of those in-betweens, it was especially at the turn of the 19^th century that spaces begun to be conceived as to extend social order over the outdoors, and in turn to overlap social and private space.

Today, urban space is perceived as substantial in itself, even though its quality remains elusive to architecture. In between the signs that fill the streets of overlaying codes there is still room for deviance, and simultaneity brings about the unexpected. Can it be planned or is it only possible to grasp it by occupying it? The modern city has been able to incorporate those moments in which we just want to switch on the mirror ball and let its shine dissolve the edges and merge the bodies.

Madonna, exercising her citizen’s right to let loose, location unknown. This is the climax of the “Hung up” single’s clip (Dir. Johan Renck), which updates contents from the 70’s, especially Abba’s theme “Gimme gimme” and the movie “Saturday night fever”, into a celebration of urban life.

Contributor’s bio: Miguel Torres-Garcia is an architect based in Seville, Spain, and performs technical assistance in the fields of planning, heritage management and international aid. Following his architecture studies he worked as a specialist in development aid, obtained an MSc in Spatial Planning and is now furthering his interest in public space research.

In recent years there has been an explosion of films on the informal constructions (favela’s in Portuguese) spreading over the hills of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The Elite Squad (1997), City of God (2002) and The Elite Squad 2 (2010) are only a few examples of such productions. All are filmed in the streets, alleys and interiors of the favela, while the plot evolves in most cases around gang violence and drug trafficking. So besides the fact that the slum returned in the mass media, if it ever was really missing, as geographer Alan Gilbert (2007) mentioned, with it also the slum spectacle. In most new film productions, these ‘slum’ spaces together with its inhabitants are equated to violence and gang culture. The international prizes these films received do NOT improve the situation for the inhabitants at all, on the contrary, they only strengthen the Brazilian government’s rhetoric in their attempt to clear these pockets of ‘violence’.

Besides the usual travel brochures highlighting the many tropical beach paradises or Rio’s yearly carnival festive, we hardly come to see other visions on the city and its slums. And they do exist! There have been projects made from different disciplines, such as architecture (whether you believe it or not), graphic design, documentary filmmakers and photographers. And I am not referring to Mike Davis’ book The Planet of Slums, by which I mean that we have to think of representations that go beyond the hopelessness of these situations. We have to think about representations that can counter and critique existing and forthcoming slum spectacles.

High Rise, a film I saw some weeks ago in a screening made by TINAG (This Is Not a Gateway), fits well in this discussion. Although the title is not well translated from Portuguese to English, since Um Lugar ao Sol translates as A Place in the Sun, it does link the film interestingly to one of Ballard’s well-known books High-Rise from 1972. However, this time we are not confronted with a dystopian vision of high-rise living; a kind of favelization of the high rise building. Instead, we are siting in luxury penthouses lined up along the beautiful white beaches of Rio de Janeiro. In these luxury paradises the discourses on poverty, violence and the right to the city appear at first sight far removed. However the contrary is perhaps more true. By focusing on how poverty is framed from above, through the penthouse windows, we can reflect on the mindset of the rich people and the middle class people (see interview with Mascro in Festival Visions du reel – Nyon 2009).

The young Brazilian documentary maker Gabriel Mascaro produced High Rise in 2009. And just as his first documentary, The Beetle KFZ-1348 and forthcoming, Defiant Brasilia (2010), Mascaro searches to capture the interplay between objects, architecture, the built environment and people. Here, he deals with the popular rise of the penthouse in the city of Rio De Janeiro, owned mostly by Brazil’s new and fast emerging rich middle class or better said Brazil’s nouveaux riches. These luxury flats – with their own garden, often with swimming pool overlooking a flat horizon, complete privacy and lack of any curious neighbours – are Brazil’s gated communities.

The film works as a extended montage whereby nine proud penthouse owners are juxtaposed with shots from their building on to the beach and Atlantic Ocean; glimpses from their house; views from the window on to the informal settlements of Rio concierges; images of the buildings themselves with strange names such as Akropolis, Versaille, Cannes and many other epic names; and sometimes with interview excerpts with the concierge of one of the buildings. The selection of the nine penthouse owners was simple and easy. They were the only once of 125 whom Mascaro found in a recent publication of penthouse owners that reacted on his call to be interviewed for his film. While often such modes of production fail -interviews that are extensively cut up, spread out over the whole length of the film and juxtaposed with other images or interviews – here it seems to work very well. For me one of the explanations why in High Rise it does work very well is because of the content of the interviews. In their responses, practically all interviewee’s frame there life in opposition to the informal settlements close to their own house. Images of luxurious penthouses are thus overlaid with images of poverty and violence through language and words. We no longer see slums, instead, in our perception images of wealth collides with images of poverty. So while these penthouse owners are constantly defending their position and attitude high above, we can no longer identify with them. We can only feel empathy for the Other, the one that lives in those informal settlements! Several episodes could be recounted here, but there is one that always stayed with me: “fireworks”. In that particular episode one female penthouse owner describes, by using many gestures, the shooting between gangs in the nights as a kind of celebratory fireworks. She explained how much she enjoyed those spectacles from her windows!

By the way if anybody wants to experience life or views from a penthouse window during their visit to Rio de Janeiro, don’t despair, the following platform can bring you a step closer: Rio Brazil Penthouses.com.