Garage Screen summer cinema will be screening documentaries telling stories about a man among a city and a man among men.
The main question the documentary program Architecture. City. After Utopia is trying to answer is—what happens to an object of architecture, a city, a man, when the “great ideas” inherent in any ideology are left in the past. All films of the program talk about metamorphoses of perception of the utopian projects of the past century and about the laws by which spaces of the new time arise and dwell or, in the words of the program’s curators Natalia Pyilaeva and Alexey Medvedev, about how “the collapse of the grandiose plans of the twentieth century have affected our habitat".
The hero of the picture Architectones, modern French artist Xavier Veyyan—“domesticates” the masterpieces of modernism by arranging an exhibition of sculptures on the roof of Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” or by frying shish kebab on the grill shaped in the form of a miniature copy of Melnikov's house.
The main characters of the film Dream Empire—several scammers from China—are trying their best to sell apartments in grandiose ghost towns, hastily built according to the precepts of the same Le Corbusier.
The hero of the picture Having a Cigarette with Alvaro Siza, follows the modernist idea, combining the boldness and uncompromising nature of the style with respect for national characteristics and environment.
Invention by modern Canadian artist Mark Lewis speaks about the universal laws of the form, equally inherent in antique statues, paintings of old masters, and the buildings of Niemeyer and Van der Rohe.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of a U.S. public housing project. Over less then twenty years, architectural utopia turned into a sordid criminal ghetto. Its demolition was deplored as “the death of modernism”.