“Filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull’s shockingly beautiful digital video essay on the philosophy of architecture.” Mari Sasano Building Heaven, Remembering Earth offers a cross-cultural, pan-historical reflection on how the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of self and society are expressed in, and confined by, the language of architecture. “Beginning with a glimpse of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, this wild and opinionated essay peruses some of the world’s most resonant architectural sites, among them the Pantheon of Rome, Palladio’s Rotunda, Renzo Piano’s New Metropolis, Barcelona for Gaudi, then Mies van der Rohe, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, India. Director Hockenhull makes exuberant use of digital video’s ability to compose and fragment images. Towering, ornamental, and unyielding structures acquire distorted scale and unexpected malleability. The architect searches for man’s identity, trapped between the unpredictability of nature and the rigidity of the constructed environment. Building Heaven, Remembering Earth suggests that somewhere in between chaos and form lies the space of our humanity and, perhaps, a new architecture” (Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive). Other events include the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives & the Siemens-Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany (for the VRML component).
