As new archives, databases and digital research platforms are becoming available historians and theorists of architecture must face the challenge of tracing the trajectories of objects and ideas in motion. In this research we tried to address the threads and traces of modernisms in movement and understand something of the complex experience of modernity through exile.
The research presented in this exhibition depicts buildings as documentary resources, and acknowledges the entanglement of the architectural object with a complex geo-political and cultural history.
Through a series of “object-biographies” of buildings by émigré architects who were forced to leave Europe during the national socialist regime before World War Two, these documentary films aim to explore and reconnect the loose threats of a history that had crushed so many.
These object-biographies – each a film around a building, its architect, its original commissioners and its current inhabitants – describe a world in which all its constitutive parts are in movement and flux. The films screened individually, together or in sequence, aim to constitute a dispersed archive made of documents, drawings, photographs, writings and artefacts. Building upon and extending the extensive archive of the architect and historian Myra Warhaftig (1930-2008) – this filmic archive captures the entangled biography of a building with the biography of the architect, both set on an itinerant journey.