Lecture of the V&A curator Olive Horsfall Turner (online) and screening of films The Disappearance of Robin Hood and Brutal Neglect
The most daring social housing project in the British capital, Robin Hood Gardens by the architectural duo Peter and Alison Smithson from 1972 disappeared from the sight of the whole city. The V&A Museum reacted on the demolition by an attempt to save and archive a piece of the building for its collections. This extraordinary act later became part of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018 under the lead of the V&A curator Olivia Horsfall Turner, who will be the festival guest and introduce the project.
The architecture historian Klára Brůhová will present the approach towards the care of architecture from the same period in the Czech Republic.
The Disappearance of Robin Hood
Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou | 2018 | Switzerland, United Kingdom | 25 min. | English | English sub.
The film offers expert opinions together with intimate portraits of inhabitants of the social housing, whose ideals about affordable community living disappeared as a steam over the new developer projects out of glass and steel.
Brutal Neglect
Sophie May | 2020 | United Kingdom, Czech Republic | 14 min. | English, Czech | English sub.
The decay of Hotel Thermal and its planned controversial reconstruction stands like a brutalist exclamation mark in the debate about preserving the architecture from the 1960s and 1980s. The English filmmaker and Erasmus programme graduate at FAMU in her short documentary attempts to gather various viewpoints on the building by the Machonin couple that indeed presents a significant testimony of progressive design for an international film festival.