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/.
ends