Pia Rønicke

Model for Cinema, 2007

Hilton Cologne, Marzellenstrasse 13–17 , Mon–Sun 0:00 am – 12:00 pm

Pia Rønicke (*1974) built a miniature cinema in the lobby of the Hotel Hilton Cologne, where 
she shows three of her films that reflect upon the utopian potential of modern architecture. How do social visions change during the process of realization? How are utopian designs made to fit social realities? Conversations with architects about a zone that was planned for industry but has been transformed into a residential area and urban space as a “multi-compatible system in constant change” (“Zones,” 2005) are shown next to a story edited together out of documentary photographs about the Schindler House in Los Angeles, a home famous in the 1920s and ’30s as an example of alternative, utopian residential architecture (“The Life of Schindler House,” 2002), and an animated film about a modular residential complex originating in the spirit of self-regulated systems (“Cell City – A System of Errors,” 2003). What all of the films have in com mon is the way they reflect upon the beauty of the utopian (in terms of both content and aesthe-tics), its antagonistic relationship to real life, and the tense relationship between vision and a sense of estrangement.