SAUERBRUCH HUTTON ARCHITEKTEN

Architects at work: a priori nothing lends itself better to cinema, nothing is more graphic than shots that alternate between the drawing and the built structure, between the two-dimensional plan and the three dimensional result. Yet this film, with its corporate-sounding title, shot over three months in a large Berlin-based firm abandons this clarity to instil a generalised doubt – not so much about the value of those it films as about its own critical viewpoint. Certainly, it is no trifling matter that in one of their on-going projects (a Virtual Reality Centre in Laval), the architects are trying to merge the building into the landscape: the invisibility justified by the end use of the building operates as a clue to the fact that, in architecture, during the design phase there is nothing to see, and that actual construction is less a matter of a change in scale than a sudden, demiurgic leap where there is no going back. In this group portrait, the creators appear both as master rhetoricians and children playing with materials and colours. Through their changing opinions, what Farocki is questioning is nothing less than the relationships between word and matter – which inevitably finds a mirror of cinema in the renewed mystery of architectural art: producing form from discourse. (Charlotte Garson)