This month the British Film Institute is showing a series of films to mark the 175th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The idea is to get us thinking about how architecture affects our lives, from the routes taken by local buses to the impact of iconic, ‘catwalk-type’ buildings like the Gherkin.
I was attracted to last weekend’s double-bill because the two featured films sounded so utterly different from each other. A Convenient Truth looks at Curitiba, a city in southern Brazil which since the 1970s has placed sustainability at the heart of its urban planning. 12 Views of Kensal House is a biography of an estate built in west London in 1936 to house local people living in over-crowded conditions.
Countries, like people and fashions, have moments and Brazil is having a big moment. Apart from Rio’s date with the 2016 Olympics it’s the 50th anniversary of Brasilia, the country’s modernist capital next year. Brazil is one of the E7, the group of ‘emerging’ nations whose collective GDP is due to outstrip that of the G7 - the US, Britain, Germany etc - within 20 years or so. Yet to outsiders like me Brazil still tends to have just two images - rich, beautiful people showing off their possibly surgically enhanced bottoms on the beach or desperately poor people shooting each other and being brutalised by a corrupt police force.
A Convenient Truth gives another view of Brazil and is welcome for that alone. Back in the 1960s Curitiba had all the problems that still plague many cities today. Its polluted central district was prone to gridlock and surrounded by slums, floods were a regular occurrence in poorer areas and the only thing blossoming were the piles of rubbish. Mayor Jaime Lerner decided radical change was the only solution and began to restructure the city’s transport, housing and rubbish collection systems, sometimes in the face of local opposition. Initially shopkeepers were horrified when one of the city’s main streets was closed to traffic to create Brazil’s first pedestrian mall. Yet as shoppers lingered - and spent money - in a place free from traffic noise and fumes neighbouring traders called for their streets to be pedestrianised too.
Maria Terezinha Vaz’s film about Curitiba is pretty relentlessly upbeat, little time is given to the problems and setbacks inherent in policies which seek to change the whole ethos of a place. But this optimism is engaging, especially when so much media talk on the environment is doom-laden.
I was particularly taken with Curitiba’s approach to water management. One area that flooded regularly has been turned into a park, spangled with lakes and landscaped into a series of terraces and shallow valleys that act as a drainage and overflow system in the event of heavy rain. It seems to be a classic example of working with nature, rather than struggling against it.
Curitiba’s beautiful park made me think of New Orleans, a city that’s had a few problems with water recently. I suspect NO is a lot more central to the US economy than Curitiba is to Brazil’s and its problems can’t be sorted out by pretty parks alone but some of the same techniques would surely be applicable.
Compared to the film about Curitiba 12 Views of Kensal House had a rather melancholy feel. In a sense this film is a double period piece - made in 1984 it contains several excerpts from a much earlier film dating back to 1938. Splicing together shots of the estate and a series of interviews with residents and Maxwell Fry, the estate’s chief architect, the film neatly sums up the gap between vision and reality that plagues social housing in Britain.
Fry recalled how, despite the excitement of working on Kensal House - “we hadn’t built like this since the eighteenth century” - he felt he was still “trying to fit a quart into a pint pot”. The pint pot in this case was an oddly shaped piece of land, wedged between a rail-line and a gasometer.
The vexed ideological question of private versus public funding also shaped Kensal House’s history. Money for the flats was put up by the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company and they were built partly to advertise the virtues of gas power. When the estate became a drain on the Coke Company’s finances after the Second World War it was off-loaded onto London County Council. Many tenants dated the estate’s decline into rundown, hard-to-let status back to this transfer.
Allowing for these restrictions and disappointments it was still easy to admire aspects of Kensal House as the camera panned across its elegant curved facade and nosed into kitchens and living rooms. Compared to many newer properties the rooms looked spacious and the windows large.
Last year the London Assembly estimated 750,000 Londoners are living in overcrowded conditions. This summer Shelter in Scotland said the amount of social housing available to rent is at its lowest for 50 years. No wonder 12 Views of Kensal House has a melancholy air - its vision of an adequate supply of decent accommodation at reasonable rents is something we glimpsed and then lost before it ever became a reality.
Of Dreams and Cities is on until the end of the month and there are still plenty of films coming up, including a look at Frank Gehry’s career and several showings Of Time and the City, Terence Davies’ tribute to Liverpool. The Mediatheque which lets you explore BFI’s archive for free has a whole host of architectural films and documentaries.
