UNFINISHED SPACES

The New Orleans Film Society, in partnership with the Prytania Theatre and Mathes Brierre present:

UNFINISHED SPACES

Wednesday, April 25, 2012
7:00 p.m.
Prytania Theatre
5339 Prytania Street

Official film synopsis: In 1961, three young, visionary architects were commissioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to create Cuba’s National Art Schools on the grounds of a former golf course in Havana, Cuba. Construction of their radical designs began immediately and the school’s first classes soon followed. Dancers, musicians and artists from all over the country reveled in the beauty of the schools, but as the dream of the Revolution quickly became a reality, construction was abruptly halted and the architects and their designs were deemed irrelevant in the prevailing political climate. Forty years later the schools are in use, but remain unfinished and decaying. Castro has invited the exiled architects back to finish their unrealized dream. View trailer here.

Tickets may be purchased online through theprytania.com or at the box office. 

The Futurist on Film

Union Tank Car Dome, photograph by Alfred Gebhardt, originally uploaded by anthonyb_chicago.

Yesterday MAKE magazine celebrated Buckminster Fuller's birthday. He would have been 115 years young.

I recently watched Evan Mather's A Necessary Ruin (Handcrafted Films 2009). When the Union Tank Car Dome outside Baton Rouge was completed in 1958 it was the largest clear span structure in the world. This futurist dome was no longer in use and had been abandoned. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana fought for its adaptive reuse, even suggesting that it could be moved to an alternate site. However, the dome was demolished in the secret of night in November 2007, just shy of its fiftieth birthday.

In September DOCOMOMO US/Louisiana will present A Necessary Ruin in a special screening. Date and location to be announced.