The Learn’d on AFFR

This splendid short video, for which I had the honour to assist in it’s creation, will be shown on the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (www.AFFR.nl)
on Friday October 9th next week at 13.30h in Lantaren Venster, just before the main film ‘Strange and Familiar’.

I invite you all to go and watch it!

The title of this short video, directed by Victor Vroegindeweij (The Office for Nonfiction Storytelling), on the Education Center of Erasmus MC Rotterdam by KAAN Architecten, originates from the poem by Walt Whitman ’When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer’, performed during the film.

It is a short film about architecture and the poetry of light and space. In an empty building, a temple of knowledge, movement is detected. Two people in their youth, desperate for meaning, are looking for human contact in a world of facts and figures.

The Learn’d has been realized in occasion of the shortlist nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2015 and will be part of the exhibition that opened its doors on May 7th, 2015 at the Mies van der Rohe Pavillion in Barcelona.
This exhibition can currently be seen in BOZAR Brussels.

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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