Beauty and the Right to the Ugly is a cinematic experiment set in the multifunctional community centre Het Karregat in Eindhoven. Het Karregat, designed by architect Frank van Klingeren and completed in 1974, was constructed in the centre of a neighbourhood of new housing, seeking to encourage communal forms of habitation. The design was an open-plan space wherein different activities and functions – a library, a school, a café, a health centre, a supermarket and communal area – would be connected as part of the same superstructure. This was intended as an experiment at a social level, to become a catalyst for bringing together the neighbours and enhance social contact through negotiation and conflict. It was kept functionally open in order to allow the users to shape the space. Produced through multiple shoots, one of which one was open to the public, the film examines the development – and partial failure – of this utopian architecture, while conceiving and implementing a filming methodology that translates architectural premises such as ‘open’, ‘user-led’ and ‘participative’ into cinematic devices.




Stills




Installation view of Berlinale Forum Expanded, 2015, Akademie der Künste Berlin. Photographs by David von Becker



Installation view including display tables for borrowed works by Constant Nieuwenhuis at Van Abbemuseum, 2014. Photographs by Peter Cox