WAR, acronym for Warehouse of Architecture and Research, is an architecture studio based in Rome, founded in 2013 by Jacopo Costanzo, Valeria Guerrisi and Gabriele Corbo. In 2016 they conceived a series of lectures entitled Generazione: a call from Rome that became a travelling exhibition (in New York, Rome and at RIBA, London) named Re-Constructivist Architecture in which fourteen emergent (at the time, now established) architecture firms took part. Here they got to know Adam Nathaniel Furman, who opened this column selecting movies about architecture and design – and it is with the selection of the British designer that the one by WAR set up an Anglo-Mediterranean dialogue.
Ten movies about architecture selected by WAR
In response to the movies selected by Adam Nathaniel Furman for Domus, a list of films that start from Italy to broaden the look on the world, chosen by the Roman trio who four years ago launched a call to the architects of their generation.
- “Why are you in Siena?”
- “I came here because Siena is the ideal city”
- “Well, also Paternò is not that bad!”
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- Elisabetta Donati de Conti
- 27 May 2020
WAR’s vision – recently focused on a huge research for Shenzhen's Biennal – is about bringing on a design method between architectural mannerism and that independent way of conducting researches that is typical of the contemporary European practice, without ever losing touch with the “Roman school” they love. In fact, their studio in via Nomentana, even hosts one of the biggest private collections of architectural books and magazines of the city, which they saved when the renowned Studio Passarelli moved out. A historical stratification that takes shape in the spaces where they work – a warehouse indeed – as well as in the design references that they always keep in mind and that indelibly marked their path, always ready to be picked out and mixed up when needed. In the same way they selected their favourite films moving along five decades of movie history putting together Hollywood colossals and Italian independent productions, rough and violent dramas, avant-garde movies that became mainstream and barely known films shot by very famous directors. A dense selection in which the aesthetical style is the common denominator and in which strong choices about photography and power prevail.
This masterpiece was entirely shot in a building that does not exist, conceived by Dante Ferretti – Oscar-awarded scenographer who worked on the best Hollywood movies – and probably inspired by a brutalist project designed by Studio Passarelli – to which we are deeply connected. A sharp criticism of the political situation of the time, the film was little popularized because of the surprising resemblance of the actor Gian Maria Volontè to Aldo Moro, who would be kidnapped and killed two years later.
We are very devoted to this movie, that we have often used to open our lectures because it is entirely set in Rome. It tells the story of an architect that comes to town to set up an exhibition about Étienne-Louis Boullé and stays here for nine months, while a series of personal issues overlap with professional matters. All the sets in the movie were designed by Costantino Dardi – even the exhibition set up.
This is a homage to the Rome that only Romans can see: the city in August, when normally tourists go to the seaside and many activities are closed. The scenes in which Moretti goes around Rome on his Vespa scooter are for us extremely poetic as they offer a new perspective on the city, even if we are not that sure that elsewhere Caro Diario could be considered as a cult movie.
Also this movie pays homage to Boullèe, but in a very different style. Robin Williams, who plays the main character, carries out a Dantesque journey with all the abundant special effects typical of the late nineties productions – the feature that made this film win an Oscar the following year. In a passage through the purgatory, the director reconstructs the space of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1785) by the famous architect – he himself inspired by Raffaello's Athen's School – creating a suggestive space with water instead of the floor and with no walls on the sides of the stairs. A film with a unique imaginative world rich of references to art.
Set in Seaside, a town in Florida with buildings by Aldo Rossi, Steven Holl, Leon Krier, Machado and Silvetti and Robert Stern, this visionary movie synthesises the language of postmodern capitalism, in a context that materializes in the most normal – and because of this, unexpected – scenery, one of the worst dystopian implications imagined by Dick, Orwell, Sturges or Scheckley.
Every movie by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is a masterpiece in which space is a narrative tool, without ever becoming a symbol. The Family Friend shows landscapes of Rome that are very different from the ones he shows in many other movies, and the story develops in a planned city founded in fascist days between Sabaudia and other spots on the coast of Lazio, in an imaginary space with the typical scale of those very specific urban plannings. What Sorrentino was able to do here, was to catch some of the features of those cities without a moralistic point of view – and here lies the greatness of the director in our opinion.
In this animation movie by Gorō Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki's son, some students are committed to the conservation of a historical school building that was the clubhouse of the group of friends and the base for a young intellectual community. The plot revolves around the preservation of this beautiful structure named Quartier Latin – reference to the quarter in Paris where the Sorbona University is situated and one of the crucial areas in which the protests of May ‘68 occured. A film about the fight for the protection of architecture which is as excellent as the entire production of Studio Ghibli.
First and only movie directed by the Sicilian actor, it tells about the relationship between architecture and cinema. It is the story of a man from Palermo who decides to move to Siena, because he truly believes that this Tuscan town embodies the concept of the ideal city. He instead finds himself in a Kafkian situation and even involved in a homicide. Commenting the idealization of Lo Cascio who, even if driven by a sense of duty, ends up a bit hampered with life, a meaningful dialogue happens between the protagonist and a carabiniere who comes from a little town in Sicily named Paternò:
- “Why are you in Siena?”
- “I came here because Siena is the ideal city”
- “Well, also Paternò is not that bad!”
Little known masterpiece by the New York director, this movie is an impeccable, almost mannerist, exercise in style, based on a historical novel about the persecutions suffered by Christians in Japan around the seventeenth century. It is a violent and long film where architecture is pervasive: many scenes take place in micro-spaces typical of the Japanese domesticity – and even in confinement cells – secluded and anguished spaces where the control on thought and on what happens in the interiors is sharpened. Silence also highlights the importance of the relationship with objects, even symbolically.
The ninth work of the Mexican director is dedicated to his territory and follows the events of a family that lives in Colonia Roma, a quarter of Mexico City. In Roma – to which we are devoted now also because of the title – scenes are set in everyday domestic spaces which are also poetic and evocative. They start with the bucketfuls of water washing the walkway at the entrance, they move through the floors of the house and culminate in the area where to hang out the washing. It is a movie by a master-director who is becoming cult, where the house is intended as irreducible nucleus and founding organism for society and communities.