Celebrated for their unique, lively, and intimate take on architecture, in their films Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine break with the traditional representation of architecture, choosing instead to follow people living inside buildings, focusing on them instead of capturing empty structures. In a new video, Louisiana Channel interviews the Italian filmmaker and architect Ila Bêka, in which he discusses the rhythm of everyday life within contemporary architecture projects, and their importance in triggering emotions.
We felt that the movement inside architecture is very important to understand how the architecture works.
– Ila Bêka
Ila Bêka. Image from Bêka & Lemoine Interview: The Emotion of the Space by Louisiana Channel; Video Still
Bêka talks about a selection of films (compiled from the duo’s Living Architectures film series) which triggered an emotional response from the people using the space on a daily basis. He wanted to go beyond the picturesque image provided by the owners of the buildings, the architects or the magazines, and focus on the proportionality, functionality, and emotional response to the architecture.
Housekeeper of The Bordeaux House by Koolhaas. Image from Bêka & Lemoine Interview: The Emotion of the Space by Louisiana Channel; Video Still
The interview begins with an in-depth look into the life of the housemaid of Koolhaas’ Bordeaux House, and her occasional difficulty in cleaning some areas of the house. The couple spent 2 weeks observing the housekeeper and following her everyday moves in the hopes of understanding the circulation of the space and how well the building flows. Bêka claims that “when you want to think about a new building, you have to think about people cleaning it, as it goes together.”
House 8 by BIG. Image from Bêka & Lemoine Interview: The Emotion of the Space by Louisiana Channel; Video Still
Bêka moves on to describe their 21-day journey in BIG’s 8 House, observing plants, animals, and children. Children were crucial in his observation, as they do not understand the rules of architecture. Instead, children feel the space and move around based on their emotional response, which helped Bêka & Lemoine understand the space more deliberately.
Yasuo Moriyama. Image from Bêka & Lemoine Interview: The Emotion of the Space by Louisiana Channel; Video Still
Next, the duo looked for someone who had a strong relationship with a space; someone who couldn’t live somewhere else because the building was tailor-made, which is why they chose to study the Moriyama House. The couple noticed that Yasuo Moriyama, the house owner, read books in different places around the house, only to realize that each area in the house reflected a certain mood presented in the books he was reading. Moriyama had a poetic relationship with the space, as described by Bêka, which helped the two underline these poetic moments and turn them into a collection of observations people don’t see very often.