Part of Summer 1999
Pleasure Dome is pleased to present the Toronto premiere of Oliver Hockenhull’s most recent film/video essay Building Heaven, Remebering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect. An intensley visual study of architecture , Building Heaven acrues evidence on how design touches culture, in it’s social and ideal forms. The work is decidedly transcultural in scope, situating itself through a nomadic and transhistorical approach in anticipated view of a future of subtle associative cultural references. Building is an expansive, real and imaginary journey, at times self-reflexive (and thus questioning) of its own panoptic complicity.
Building Heaven weaves an extrodinary narrative through visual letters of an incomplete alphabet inspired by thoughts on Brugel’s Tower of Babel to the Pantheon in Rome to Schinkel’s Berlin to Barcelona’s Modernismo to Chicago’s skyscrapers to the mind reading birds of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to the immaculate whores of Amsterdam to the other-worldly lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar to a cloud between Heaven and Earth to the erotic sun temple at Konark to the city of light known in ancient days as Kashi now as Varanasi to Palladio’s “Rotunda” to Renzo Piano’s “new Metropolis” to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s aestheitic to the significance (partial) of the Shiva-lingum to the structure of a zygote to the shape of water to how, yes, official Nazi architect Albert Speer finally died.
