What is a House? The Living Space in Movies
This publication compiles some of the work produced at the seminar “Living the House. Architecture and film�, which was hold at the AAP Cornell University for the spring semester 2017. The topic is highly seductive, and in many other occasions, researchers have gone through the mutual relations of film and architecture as standalone disciplines interacting to each other, or even showing how they have evolved and related through their very particular history. Nevertheless, the seminar focused more on the spaces themselves, where the stories are told, and the single houses in particular. It may be not arbitrary that some of the great houses that are part of our history books are the sets where both outstanding but also banal films have been shot. More than any other visual medium, film, by virtue of the size of its audience, its global dissemination and its growing influence on culture, shapes the popular perceptions of architecture. Movies have been used as an open field, rather than singular items or case examples. By learning how some of the most prominent modern houses are depicted in films, we can better understand how they are disseminated. Rather than focusing in houses as objects, the aim is to identify the concepts which make those locations work better for telling the story the filmmaker wants to share. In some occasions, they perform even differently to how they were supposed when designed, opening the door to a new range of interpretations beyond an orthodox historical approach. The concepts vary from a wide range, such as the glass box; the machine house; the minimalist apartment; the palace; the monument; or the enclosed landscape, among others. The list is far from being closed, althouh those few help to better understand the ideas that have driven the practice of this outstanding and successful architecture typology. What is a House?
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Our modern society deserves something better than just a space that it is the addition of spatial elements or individual cells. Radical approaches often define a non characteristic nature that underlines how all the parts relate and behave, forcing the house to acquire its own personality. So, it is not accidental that the most successful modern houses are no more just a muted space or a standard scenario: they have been transformed into an active character that definitely plays a role in our quotidian stories. Those magical spaces usually have the ability to transform our human daily events into something closer to ontological categories rather than being only particular scenes of our day to day events.