Three Little Worlds: Benjamin Critton – Sad People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films Slumber Party

New York based graphic designer Benjamin Critton spends his final night in the UK in Three Little Worlds, for some live research around his forthcoming project, tentatively titled Sad People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films. Join us for popcorn, beer, and a movie marathon exploring Hollywood’s co-option of modernist domiciles, as homes for the forlorn and dispossessed and architectural characters in their own right – in the midst of Bureau Spectacular’s exploration of stories and architecture.

Following his celebrated tabloid newspaper treatise on modernism and villainy – Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films – Critton is returning to playfully explore popular culture’s negative anthropomorphism of modernism. Having found Evil People in films from Bond to Twilight, using their modernist jewels as lairs, his next stage of investigation looks at modernism as a prison for the depressed. From Colin Firth’s existential crisis in John Lautner’s 1949 Schaffer Residence, to investigations of a family slowly falling into chaos in New Canaan – home of the Harvard Five’s domestic modernist experiments – the perceived sterility of the modern movement has frequently been used by the movies as pathetic fallacy, for often tragic protagonists.

Critton will kick off the evening with an informal presentation of his Evil People project, before we settle in for the night to find the Sad, through a screening schedule of films and excerpts that will be revealed on the night as an unfolding research session.

The evening will end when the last person leaves, or everyone falls asleep. BYO sleeping bag.

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