From the Foundations to the Sky

This video is a narrative that combines a succession of paintings, designs and magazine covers by the Hungarian modernist artist Lajos Kassák and a reading of an excerpt from the novel by Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris : a chapter titled “this will kill that”.
Kassák was a painter, a graphic designer, a writer, and a poet, as well as a constructivist revolutionary. He was the founder of several avant-garde magazines that reflected on the utopian nature of architecture, revolution, society, urbanism, art and literature.
This text focuses on the relationship between architecture and the printing press developed by Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg pioneered a revolution that completely changed people’s access to culture. Victor Hugo in this text describes how the printed book became stronger and more durable than any building built by man. Thus the printed book would “kill” architecture as the main vehicle for perpetuating culture.
The common thread of these two worlds is an overlap of different views on architecture as a metaphor for the construction of a society. The distinct time frames of these two utopian visions point to contrasts, similarities and contradictions within the history of European culture.