Intro

COLONNADE PARK (54 min, 2011)

Oct 5, 7pm

ACFNY / Austrian Cultural Forum New York, 11 E 52nd St, New York, NY 10022

On occasion of Archtober 2016 – New York City’s Architecture and Design month – the ACFNY presents a special screening of Heidrun Holzfeind’s Colonnade Park. The film explores architect Mies van der Rohe’s high rise apartment buildings in Newark and the lives and stories of the people inhabiting it. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Austrian artist Heidrun Holzfeind, architecture historian Mariana Mogilevich and MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll.

The film portrays Mies van der Rohe’s Colonnade and Pavilion apartment buildings in Newark through conversations with its inhabitants. Built between 1954 and 1960, Mies’ three glass-and-steel towers and the Christopher Columbus Homes, a public housing project in between them, marked the beginning of urban renewal in Newark. Interviews with tenants about their experiences of living in the classic modernist buildings are juxtaposed with shots of their apartments and stunning views from their windows.

“An interesting thing about Heidrun Holzfeind’s work […] is the way it leads us to ask a different sort of question. That is, it manifests a notion of architecture not purely as image, not purely as volume, but as social space, as a molding and molded shell homologous to other social structures reactive with its users, its residents. Holzfeind’s work eludes the category of artifact because the unquantified social relations within and without replace the archeologist’s brush and magnifying glass. It is not buried and unearthed but always inhabited, always operative. It is not concerned with the question of modernism per se but rather with the inter-secting subjectivities produced in spite and because of modernism’s and modernization’s aggregations.” (Nico Vicario)

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Heidrun Holzfeind is an artist and filmmaker who questions immanent architectural and social utopias of modernist residential buildings, exploring the borders between history and identity, individual histories and political narratives of the present. Her works have been exhibited and screened at numerous art institutions and film festivals, both nationally and internationally.

Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism whose research focuses on the design and politics of the public realm. She is Editor in Chief of Urban Omnibus and teaches at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

Barry Bergdoll is curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. In 2001 he co-curated the MoMA exhibition Mies in Berlin which was dedicated to an in-depth look at Mies’s early career. Bergdoll is also Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.