'European Heritage Open Days' 2014 - Short film Competition winner

In September of this year I submitted a short section of my longer 'Myths of Belfast' thesis film to the European Heritage Open Days (EHOD) short film competition. The brief for the competition was as follows.

• The film’s subject matter must be concerned with Northern Ireland’s built heritage.
• The film MUST qualify for a ‘Universal’ age group and therefore be family friendly e.g. no swearing, no exposures to violence on camera.
• The film must last no longer than 5 minutes, and be submitted in the appropriate format.

The competition was judged by Stephen Hackett of the Belfast Film Festival, who said of my film "This film demonstrates an excellent understanding of the architectural history of Belfast.  The visual effects used are both interesting and creative." My entry won the award for 'best film,' and was shown as part of the EHOD2014 Thank You event held at Brownlow House in Lurgan on the 22nd November 2014. I received my prize of £200 from Michael Weir, the director of the Belfast Photo Festival, and Colin McCusker, the Mayor of Craigavon.

Michael Weir, director of the Belfast Photo Festival, Colin McCusker, Mayor of Craigavon and myself at the EHOD2014 Thank You event in Brownlow House, Lurgan, 22.11.14

You can view the winning film below. The longer film, 'Myths of Belfast,' will be available to view online and on DVD in the new year.

The City As An Idea - a reflection on what I'm doing

As the end of the year approaches and I plan and contemplate the body of work ahead I've been, understandably, thinking about what I've done and how it should proceed. I now think I can explain my map and my films in a way I could not have done before, even when I was producing them.

For the first time in a while I listened to the song 'Going to your Funeral' by The Eels, the reprise of which I used in my first film 'To Belfast.'

There is a line in the original song which goes 'Look at all the people with the flowers in their hands. They put the flowers on the box that's holding all the sand that was once you.' It struck me that this has a significance to the last film I made, 'Tomb.' 

The film concludes by suggesting that the attitude that Belfast is in some way dead, or even profoundly damaged, is a total misnomer. Belfast is not a living organism and cannot be dead or even injured. We can use the metaphor to describe our opinions in a poetic and engaging way, but when it comes to honestly trying to get the city working we need to remember they are only metaphorical and ultimately not true. So when E quite unromantically remarks that whatever resides in the box at the funeral is indeed not his loved one but rather a pile of 'sand,' this applies even more readily to a city.

A city is what John Searle would call a social construct (in particular an institutional social construct); if it were not for us grouping the set of phenomena relating to this specific space on earth into a subset which we label Belfast, then Belfast would simply not be. Belfast is a set of ideas, be it the approach to the sandbank ford, the strategic gateway to the Ards, the residence of the Chichester family, the incorporated market town, 'boomtown' of Imperial Victoriana, modernist hub of industry and commerce, religious warzone or 21st century tourism and shopping destination. 

As Alan Moore suggested in 'V for Vendetta,' ideas don't die. Ideas ebb and flow, they contradict and adjust. They defy three dimensional space and fly in the face of logic and rationality. Cities, like ideas, are not things or objects, but are dynamic lived processes which refute absolutism and universality. Any perception we have of an idea dying or not being there is just that; a perception. A perception of the passing of a way-of-being we held dear, or at worst reified. As long as we bear in mind that they are simply ideas which suggest a way of living then their departure should not worry us so much.

Cry onwards to the next 'Belfast!'

The will to a system...

'The will to system is a lack of integrity' 1

For some reason the above Nietzsche quote has always stuck in my mind. Perhaps it captured my attention given my field of interest; the practice of architecture could be described as 'the will to a system,' an attempt to rationalise a way of life by allowing it to 'congeal' into the physical realm. The subjective objectified.

However, as the world becomes smaller and the tower of babel slowly spirals skyward, architects feels increasingly redundant; knocked off their neo-classical pedestals by the errors and decadence of the modernist experiment, a 'lack of integrity' conspicuously exposed. The concept of an all encompassing, life defining method-of-execution seems increasingly absurd. There cannot be a 'correct' answer concerning how to live.

I reached these conclusions concerning my mild fixation with this Nietszchean snippet after reading 'Citizens of No Place - an architectural graphic novel.' Set in a hypothetical future where the earth is uninhabitable and mankind finds itself adrift in 'Noah's Ark In Space,' this book starkly illustrates the absurdity of the architect's reliance on the diagram to the degree where the individual is lost amidst the statistics. While the situations described in the book seem far fetched, the attitudes and approaches to design feel frighteningly familiar.

Life translated into a diagram in order to realise a design never seems to get retranslated back into life. Worse still, architectural diagrams often pose as the reason for a piece of architecture rather than simply the whims of the egotistical designer.

These thoughts were punctuated by the viewing of the film 'The Lives of Others.' Set in authoritarian East Berlin in the early 80s, the folly of the attempt to reduce life down to a system is made explicit. Here we see a Stasi observer compelled to intervene in the lives of the observed rather than simply to document, becoming tangled in the emotions and vibrancy of the lives he watched rather than seeing it as the raw data he is expected to produce. It becomes impossible to passively observe as the observer's subjectivity defines his relationship with the observed. A dull stack of files becomes loaded with meaning for the observed, just as an abstract book dedication is for the observer. A system only makes sense when it is contextualised against the passion of human relationships.

A system must serve the users; users must not serve a system.

I suppose the other side of the coin is to consider architecture as an enabler, a facilitator and enhancer of existing ways of life. Most systems seem to start like this; inevitably the system seems to overtake the way of life which defined it and the roles are reversed.

So where does this leave architecture? The short answer is 'Fucked if I know...' - I'll try to get back to you with a long answer.

1 'Twilight of The Idols' Friedrich Nietzsche
2 'Citizens of No Place'
3 'The Lives of Others'