AFFR_MAG_ONTWERP_DEF2_16sep.indd 60
16-09-13 21:10
review
AFFR AFFR/∕ 2013
high in the clouds
1 Sunday Oct 13 - 21.30 hrs
film: Skyscraper Souls Edgar Selwyn
editors
1 Friday Oct 11 - 20.15 hrs
film: Men at Lunch Seán O Cualáin 1 Saturday Oct 12 - 15.30 hrs
special: Celluloid Skyline by James Sanders related films: Reaching
for the sky
Skyscrapers are rather different to high-rise. They cannot be explained in terms of economic, rational motives such as high land prices or population densities, skyscrapers are more particularly associated with the emotion of seeing and being seen. Skyscrapers have symbolic meaning as the film world has well recognised. Both the film and the skyscraper came into existence at approximately the same time and, like no other icons, they represent the development of the United States in the twentieth century. Sometimes in the form of a film set and, on a number of occasions, even as the leading player, the skyscraper on the silver screen represents all the emotional aspects of the country’s development: hope, struggle, pride, courage, future, daring, power and optimism. In Skyscraper Souls everything revolves around David Dwight (Warren William), a man who is only interested in two things: his hundred-storey-high skyscraper and women. He built the fictitious Seacoast Building, just like many other skyscrapers in New York at the time, purely for speculative reasons. In the film we see Dwight always on the go keeping all the women in his life happy and, at the same time, struggling to hold on to his business and his skyscraper. The construction of the skyscraper also commands our admiration: fearless, sturdy men who
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have no fear of heights carry out their work in all weathers. Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the famous black-and-white photo, is one of the most wellknown images from a period in which the unlimited opportunities of America were embodied by the new skyscrapers. Eleven construction workers take a lunch break sitting on a steel girder suspended somewhere high in the sky, their feet dangling above New York. Men at Lunch is an attempt to identify these men, but it also incorporates historical footage, thus presenting the context in which the photograph was taken and in which it became iconic. Reaching for the Sky is an account of the personal and professional dilemmas facing Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit during the realisation of the TV tower in Guangzhou, the highest tower in China. This was their first large commission and they are both painfully confronted with, and pleasantly charmed by, the Chinese approach to architecture and the way projects are carried out. As the author of Celluloid Skyline, New York and the Movies no one knows better than architect and filmmaker James Sanders how to express the spell that skyscrapers cast. What makes skyscrapers so attractive? During the AFFR James Sanders will give a public lecture Saturday at 15.30 hrs.