Photography courtesy of Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine

There’s something naughty about Living Architectures, a series of four short films by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine on view now at Storefront for Art and Architecture, through February 27. Sitting in the dimly lit gallery on worn theater seats and watching them unfurl in continuous loops on the wall feels a bit like visiting a peep show. While each film documents an iconic building by a well-known contemporary architect (Rem Koolhaas’ House in Bordeaux, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Pomerol Winery), it also skillfully exposes it.
     The movies open with images celebrating the formal beauty of these structures before honing in on less pretty physical realities. Footage shows water leaking from the ceiling, floor, and walls of the Bordeaux house. Bird’s-eye interior views of the Bilbao museum reveal poorly resolved geometries and a redundant steel frame. In highlighting these flaws Beka and Lemoine challenge the cultural authority of high architecture, a challenge which seems justified. The buildings they’ve chosen to examine have been conceived ideally, without a deep consideration for practicalities.
     The filmmakers also take aim at the discrepancy between the cool, lucid images of these buildings and the prosaic life that unfolds inside of them. A housekeeper struggles carrying a vacuum cleaner up the perilous winding staircase of the Bordeaux house.