TREES DOWN HERE

Commissioned by 6a Architects and MUBI

for Venice Biennale of Architecture

13MIN 16MM COLOUR 4:3

2022

Trees are the silent characters, narrating the architecture and life of Churchill College (opened in 1960) through its natural history. 6a’s Cowan Court (completed in 2016) inverted the spatial and material order of the picturesque Brutalism of the original college, shifting its mineral world of brick and shuttered concrete to timber. Cowan Court’s oak, both new and old, defines its structure and in turn encloses a central court filled with recently planted birch trees. The analogue materiality of Churchill College is matched by the film which, like the architecture and landscape, leaves traces of its own development. The human habitat is seen through nature – swaying trees, lost animals, birds of prey, the seasons – to create a new dreamlike environment in which any distinction between human life, architecture and nature is erased.

Some Trees – John Ashbery

These are amazing: eachJoining a neighbor, as though speechWere a still performance.Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morningFrom the world as agreeingWith it, you and IAre suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have inventedSuch comeliness, we are surrounded:A silence already filled with noises,A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,Our days put on such reticenceThese accents seem their own defense.