RUR Architecture will premiere two films at this year’s Venice Biennale. Responding to the social, political, cultural, and environmental upheavals of 2020, the two ten-minute films, Grassroots Institution and Carbon’s Cultural Footprint, came from the mind of firm principal and Princeton University professor Jesse Reiser. 

Frustrated with architecture’s tepid responses to the events of 2020, Reiser began exploring ways the field could more forcefully position itself culturally and politically, while mobilizing the full breadth of its expertise. 

“As architects, we should apply our hard-earned knowledge and mobilize the full cultural force of architecture to larger issues,” said Reiser. “In the films, we respectively use the example of the Seagram Building and architectural programming to show that architecture, particularly good architecture, plays a critical role in our society, and much is at stake regarding how, and how well, we utilize our skillset.”

The films are voiced by professional narrator Yumi Chu and take on varying formats and subjects. Grassroots Institution takes the form of a public service announcement, using the architectural concept of “reprogramming” to reimagine the United States’ constitution. Derived from a graduate studio course taught by Reiser last fall, the film features and argues for the work of his students, who were tasked with developing new types of organizations that exist between bottom-up grassroots and American top-down institutions. The second amendment was used as a framework for the work, and the result, the film argues, is the dissociation of the amendment with radical right-wing politics. The film highlights architecture’s flexibility, able to reorient itself toward both local and national civil services and programs.

Carbon’s Cultural Footprint combines personal anecdotes, statistics, and qualitative arguments and centers around the material exuberance of New York’s Seagram Building and the suspect histories of its architects, Phillip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. As per the firm’s press release, “...the film asserts that joie de vivre and hedonism are not one and the same and, like Valentine’s Day chocolates, the excesses in our lives are often what gives it the most sweetness.” 

The films will be shown at the Biennale’s central pavilion in the Giardini as part of an immersive multimedia installation titled Geoscope 2: Worlds.