Architecture is not a static but a dynamic, living thing. Similarly, film is highly suited to represent and experience architectures as spaces, as stages for human encounter and interaction. In the Small and Smart films architecture becomes animated, even transformed, with social input. In the same way, it serves to animate its viewers/occupants – architecture as stage and actor both.

Small and Smart consists of six short films, one of each of six built architectural projects from around Slovenia. Each employs a simple story – a development, an exchange – to move through and relate the experience of the architecture. As the films move through and document the spaces and exchanges, certain key features of the architectures are revealed; and a wider, general impression of the spaces is communicated.

Good built projects in Slovenia today generally follow a well-thought and focused approach and execution. They are, relatively speaking, of modest size. They are small not in scale nor in ambition, but small as in contained, disciplined, and specifically responsive; with room for a smile. All architectures here are recent builds (2007–2011) and are of varied types, programs and scales: private house, row house, industrial, institutional, public and sacred. Together they reflect representative currents, developments and practices in the best of Slovenian architecture today.

Jeff Bickert, Curator, Co-Producer

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Bevk-Perovič Arhitekti’s House D (Ljubljana, 2007/08) is a deceptively simple yet marvelously complex design. While it is undeniably seductively sculpturesque there is nothing gratuitous about the striking form, clean lines, fine detailing and rich materiality employed. Functionality is well at work behind each beautiful space, expressed by clearly delineated program and communication. Without forcing the analogy, the house is, in the best spirit of Le Corbusier, a machine for living.

Here we are navigating a series of program-boxes as much about planar organisation as they are about smartly staggered volumes – and voids – which create splendid occasions of light and reveal more of what lies beyond. At both ends of the first plane that is the public entry and kitchen corridor area we find access points discreetly feeding the private spaces – exercise, work and guest spaces, den, pool and sauna – downstairs. Each space reveals other program-volumes interspaced with garden-voids that break any conventional density that might threaten this delicate dance between exterior and interior, work and play, public and private.

*The Small and Smart film series was commissioned and presented in 2011 as part of Designing the Republic, a comprehensive exhibition of architecture and design in Slovenia, 1991–2011, at MAO, The Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana.

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Credits re: Small and Smart: Expressions of Contemporary Slovenian Architecture in Film

HOUSE D
BEVK PEROVIĆ ARHITEKTI
LJUBLJANA, 2007/08

curator, co-producer  JEFF BICKERT (ARK)  
director and writer  DAMJAN KOZOLE  
cinematographer  MATJAŽ MRAK   
music  NITIN SAWHNEY - HUMAN - FRAGILE WIND  
editor  JURIJ MOŠKON  
production manager  MATIJA KOZAMERNIK  
producer  DANIJEL HOČEVAR 
financial support  MINISTRY OF CULTURE REPUBLIC OF SLOVENIA
production  VERTIGO EMOTIONFILM  
for  MAO, MUSEUM OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN, 2011; Matevž Čelik

www.mao.si
Small and smart brochure