lobby

Setting and bar service in the foyer of the Filmhaus
by Martin Beck, Joerg Franzbecker, Heiko Karn, Katrin Mayer

Writing of Berlin hotels in the twenties, Siegfried Kracauer describes the hotel lobby as the paradigmatic space of modernity. In the course of delimiting and expanding toursim, the lobby takes on the function of a transit space between public and private space, of a temporary, undetermined resting spot and meeting point.

Above all, the lobby is a place of dispersion. A place where we are ‘guests in space as such.’ Herein lies the root of the lobby’s strange double quality, inasmuch as it cancels out legibility, while at the same time demanding it to a large degree. On the one hand the place constantly wraps real events in the veil of anonymity and convention, on the other it shifts those present into a state of increased mutual observation. Kracauer compares such a scenario with the performative character of a film set.

The architecture of the Filmhaus, with its glass façade, glass elevators, and the foyer displaced into the basement, might remind us another well-known hotel analysis–Frederic Jameson’s examination of John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Grand Hotel in Los Angeles. Following Jameson’s analysis, it is specifically the glass elevators that give a medium to the ‘narrative stroll,’ the free movement of the appropriation of space as experienced by the urban flâneur of modernity, and that translate it into a reflexive sign. We might say that the same thing happens in the Filmhaus, with its logic of arriving and appearing. As an apparatus of “seeing and being seen” the elevators provide those arriving with a short moment of overview, at the same time exposing them as players in a staging that is both architectural and technological, and which seems to be targeted at the guests below in the foyer.

lobby makes a temporary space available to the festival attendees for the duration of the Berlinale. Clusters of seats and the bar provide the place for a stopover of undetermined time, as well as for the consumption of food and drink. Starting form this functional dimension, we would like to translate the relations and dynamics discussed above into an atmospheric, accessible topography, specifically embedded in the architecture as a milieu, which will pursue the forms of narration and myth formation that surround and produce such places.

Graciously supported by the Delikatessen Requisiten Fundus Berlin.