4 MAY 2015

CITY TALKS: Chris Kelly and Renzo Piano films — Inside Piano

Chris Kelly introduces three short docos exposing the caustic humour of everyday life in Renzo Piano’s buildings City Gallery Wellington, Civic Square

Monday 18 May, 6pm

Free entry

City Talks is an ongoing series initiated by the New Zealand Institute of Architects Wellington Branch and presented in partnership with City Gallery Wellington.

This May, Wellington architect Chris Kelly introduces Inside Piano, three short films on three symbolic buildings of Renzo Piano’s career. The documentaries are the fifth project in French filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s Living Architectures series. Featuring a visit to the prototype-building of the Centre Pompidou, an immersion in the soundproof world of a submarine floating in the depths of the Parisian underground, and a journey aboard a luminous magic carpet of a highly sophisticated architectural machine, the films provide a humorous, caustic and quirky point of view of everyday life in Renzo Piano buildings.

Living Architectures is a series of films that seeks to develop a way of looking at architecture and turns away from the current trend of idealising the representation of our architectural heritage. The films focus less on explaining the building, its structure and its technical details and let the viewer enter into the invisible bubble of the daily intimacy of some icons of contemporary architecture.

Described by The New York Times as the “cult figures in the European architecture world”, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine mainly focus their research on experimenting with new narrative and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture. The uniqueness of their work holds on their subjective, creative and humoristic look at masterpieces of architecture portrayed through the depiction of their daily life. Ila Bêka is an Italian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. He trained as an architect with a degree from the IUAV of Venice and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Belleville. Louise Lemoine is a French filmmaker who lives and works in France. She graduated in cinema and philosophy from the Sorbonne, Paris.

Chris Kelly studied architecture at Victoria University and worked as a graduate architect with Athfield Architects before travelling through Asia to Europe. After a stint in London, Chris spent three years in Italy and Japan working with Renzo Piano Building Workshop on the Kansai Air terminal. On his return to New Zealand in 1992, he established Architecture Workshop in Wellington and since then has collaborated with RPBW on a commercial tower
and apartment project in Sydney’s CBD.

The screening will be followed by refreshments.

Film running times: 26min, 39min and 34min, totalling 99min.

For more information on Living Architectures please visit: http://www.living-architectures.com/.

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