Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais is an emblematic film of the French New Wave. Its opening scene showing images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb is narrated by Emmanuelle Riva, her voice delivering with great sensitivity the screenplay of Marguerite Duras. I could not stop thinking about my study on the appropriation of space when I saw the movie. The female character is from Nevers, a small town in France. The male character lives in Hiroshima, where they both met. There is a feeling of placeless during the whole film; the past of Hiroshima “had to be forgotten” and the couple seems to be lost in a city without any apprehensible meaning. The two characters are unrooted, they move from one place to another without care, all the settings look impersonal and interchangeable. Staying one more day in Hiroshima is too long and the night seems to never end. But there is no coming back, Nevers can only represent the troubled past of the female character. The paradox is that the film is undeniably about places, described in great details, but from the point of view of a painful detachment…
I love concrete and brutalism. Concrete is crude and fits well in a natural environment. It doesn’t need paint and decorative accessories. It is there and fills the space.
“Geographical segregation exists whenever the proportions of population rates of two or more populations are not homogenous throughout a defined space”. It is the norm in most of our cities: wealthy vicinities, china towns, Italian and Turkish districts are examples of non-uniform spread of populations. Laetitia Gauvin explained at the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon why it happens and presented some interesting variants of the phenomenon. I have edited the authors’ introduction in order to make it more accessible. I think there is much more here than technical jargon, with many social and philosophical implications.
Schelling’s segregation model for an open city: emergence of physical frontiers from a socio-spatial dynamics
