London Design Festival 2015: an apartment renovated by Groves Natcheva Architects provides the setting for this short thriller, which the London-based studio created to promote the project using "emotion" (+ movie).
Groves Natcheva Architects wanted to find a more engaging way to showcase their design, rather than simply using the typical set of still photographs showing an empty house.
They chose cinema as their medium – a technique also used by Brazil's Studio MK27, which has created films that include an architectural tour shown through the eyes of a cat and a movie that casts a modern house as a catalyst for the end of a marriage.
"Living inside a building is nothing like looking at a few pictures of one," Groves Natcheva Architects co-founder Adriana Natcheva told Dezeen. "That a new mode of representation is needed goes without saying: the question is what it should be. Depicting bright, breezy building-scapes populated by animated mannequins is the answer now in vogue, but that seems to us to miss the point."
The new movie, titled Black Ice, is the first in a series that the studio is making for their architecture and interior projects.
It is set in Groves Natcheva Architects' apartment renovation on South Kensington's Reece Mews – the former home and studio of artist Francis Bacon – which was completed in 2010.
According to the architects, the 15-minute film is "as dark and psychotically inventive as the architecture of the house in which it is set" and tells the story of an affair, revenge and attempted murder.
A blonde woman, credited as "the wife", goes to the property to accost a woman that has been sleeping with her husband.
Gun in hand, she threatens the mistress before sending her away so she can set about exacting revenge on her cheating partner.
With the backdrop of a crackling fire and the furniture used by the home's real owner, the character uses different rooms in the house while carrying out her plan.
She bakes a squid-ink gun in the kitchen, and uses shoe polish found in the bathroom to slick and darken her hair – a nod to Bacon, who used to do the same.
"Architecture stands to life as a theatrical stage stands to a play," said Natcheva. "A narrative takes you into the space without any need for abstractions."
The dark plot was chosen because the architects thought it would have more impact. Murder has previously been used as the theme for a student architecture project, while a concrete house by Langarita-Navarro was photographed as a crime scene.
"In drama, tragedy wins over comedy," said Natcheva. "This is not because tragedy is closer to reality but because it throws us harder. It is not a dour, stochastic, realism-for-its-own-sake we are after, but the rapid emotional arrest of the viewer."
Although hesitant to provide a list of references, Natcheva mentioned Bacon – a book of his work can be spotted on the coffee table – and the "black lacquer" of Modernist architect Eileen Gray as influences. She also described the film as a literal take on a lecture and text by late 19th century Austrian architect Adolf Loos' called Ornament and Crime, in which he attacked the use of ornament in design.
"We are not looking to wrap a film around an otherwise indigestible architectural message," Natcheva said. "We are trying to bring to the distant viewer the dimension that is missing from the bare surfaces alone — emotion — perceived as if one inhabited the space."
The film will be screened in a studio space on the same mews as the property to coincide with Open House London on 19 and 20 September 2015 and this year's London Design Festival, which takes place from 19 to 27 September. Viewers will also be able to take tours of the apartment to experience the space for themselves.
The post Architects produce "dark and psychotic" movie to promote apartment design appeared first on Dezeen.
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