As an UrbanToronto reader, you consider yourself an architecture buff, right? When you plan a trip, your must-do list includes visiting special buildings, and once you do walk through an impressive doorway for the first time, you pause for a moment to scan the space and really drink it in, don't you? You want to absorb every ounce of the particular flavour instilled into this space by its designer.
If that rings true for you, then you have something in common with six film directors who want to transport you to six special buildings—places across the globe both on-the-radar and off—to appreciate the soul and life of these unique structures. Showing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox starting on Friday, December 19, Cathedrals of Culture is their Christmas treat for you . Shown in two hour-and-a-half long segments, Cathedrals of Culture immerses you through beautiful 3D photography and the voices of the buildings into the spaces that six architects have created for very disparate expressions of humanity.
In the first half, Wim Wenders takes us into the Berlin Philharmonie, the 1963-built home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Michael Glawogger takes us into the National Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Michael Madsen takes us into Halden Prison in Norway. Where Berlin's concert hall is practically a musical instrument itself, airy, quirky, and built for community, St. Petersberg's library is maze-like, full to bursting with books and endless card catalogues, defiantly from a lost age and built for study, while Halden's prison is resolutely modern, restrictive, and chilling, but with hints of the humanity it is trying to inspire in its inmates.
Each building has a narrator speaking on its behalf, teasing noble aspirations out of Berlin's complicated history, waxing poetically on Russia's romantic literary heritage, or dispassionately reciting the path for reform in remotest Norway.
In the second half, Robert Redford introduces us to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Margreth Olin sweeps us around the Opera House in Oslo, Norway, and Karim Anouz tours us through the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. The Salk Institute is repetitive modern geometries in the service of scientific discovery, Snohetta's Opera House invites personal discoveries through its embrace of the place where a city meets the water and the sky, while the Paris's Beaubourg high-tech invader makes the visitor the fuel bringing its machinery to life.
Salk's narrators are the researchers working to advance medical knowledge, the Opera House's narrator talks of transformation and renewal on Oslo's changing waterfront, while the Pompidou Centre considers Parisians' initially reluctant embrace of its many treasures.
The 3D does not jump at you here, it simply helps transport into the spaces presented. Cathedrals of Culture will likely inspire some of your future travels, and will have you reflecting more about the buildings you inhabit from day to day. The Lightbox itself holds stories within its walls that could already fill a half hour documentary; maybe another set of buildings will be honoured by such a fine treatment in the future.
Screenings of Part 1 and Part 2 are ticketed separately, but if you buy tickets for both parts at once, you will save $2 per ticket. The parts are shown with a half hour break between them, but you do not have to see both parts on the same day to realize the discount. Screenings are currently scheduled from the 19th through to the 24th.