Interview with Kaspar Astrup Schröder, director of the film My Playground, and Bjarke Ingels, founder of the Bjarke Ingels Group, Coppenhagen
My Playground is really two films, it isn?t only a film about Parkour, it is also a film about architecture and urban space and the relationships between people and the space they live in. Architecture doesn?t normally get looked at this way.
Kaspar: When I started doing these test shoots with the Parkour teams I started composing my pictures according to the buildings and the space, with these guys moving within the space it became a totally different experience. This was something eye opening to me and it made the space much more alive and dynamic. There is a suburban neighborhood of garden homes flowing over a 10-storey building called THE MOUNTAIN which BIG designed in Orestad city just outside of Coppenhagen. I filmed the top Parkour team in Denmark, Team Jiyo jumping from roof to roof and did a short film. That is why Bjarke came on board I gave him the film and he was like, ?This is amazing , we have never seen our buildings in that perspective , I want to be more a part of what you are doing?. From this we began the discussion about preserving space, exploiting space and how you show architecture in a film. So it was a journey for everyone to make a film on Parkour but also on architecture.
Bjarke: Apart from being a good way of showing the occupancy or the potential life of a building it was also amazing at explaining the space in a way of transmitting the experience of moving around the ?MOUNTAIN? much better than any sort of architectural photography. In a way Parkour guys running around becomes some kind of an exploration of space that by having the Parkour people in the foreground and the building in the background. You focus on the life that is lived in the building but you experience the space that wraps around it. I just had a feeling that it was a really awesome way of actually communicating the architectural experience maybe better than any other medium that we had come across and we started a dialog with Kaspar about trying to engage with the architecture at all stages of realization. In the office looking at the architectural models, going to the construction site and moving around the building in the making and afterwards inhabiting the buildings as they have become complete.
How important is it to you both as filmmaker and as architect the publics experience of urban space that you film and you build and have you talked about that with each other?
Bjarke: Whenever you do a building or an urban space you contribute to the future life of the city and in doing that you contribute the future of the culture and the lifestyle of the inhabitants and it is important to show architecture not as some static art form with the typical architectural photography that focuses only on how light falls on a wall. My Playground is a film of course about Parkour but is also very much how public life and architecture are intricately linked. Architecture observes human life and attempts to accommodate it then human life evolves and misinterprets the architecture to expand the realm of possibility and in turn architecture observes the evolved human life and it is this continuous loop of building and living, building and living.
Tara Farrel, November 10, 2012
Source: objectivecinema.net