A Documentary Series by and with Nathan Eddy
The director Nathan Eddy will be present for a Q+A after the screening
The Absent Column
2013, 8 minutes, Color, English
Who determines the future of the past? The battle for the preservation of former Prentice Women’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, a towering concrete cloverleaf designed by master modern architect Bertrand Goldberg, opens a new chapter in the fight to save brutalist architecture.
Starship Chicago
2017, 16 Minutes, Color, English
Architect Helmut Jahn’s kaleidoscopic, controversial State of Illinois Center is a run-down rusty shadow of its former self. The blockbusting building divided critics and the public upon opening in 1985, but as post-modernism receives a cultural reevaluation, will preservationists persevere in protecting this epoch-defining architectural extravaganza?
Battleship Berlin
2021, 40 Minutes, Color, German with English Subtitles
Berlin’s brutalist heritage is under fire. The city’s powerful Charité hospital wants to demolish the notorious former animal research facility known as the Mäusebunker, but a stalwart group of gallerists, architects and preservationists push to landmark and re-use this uncompromisingly unique work of architecture. Preservation can be brutal.
Helmut Jahn: In a Flash
2021, 15 Minutes, Color, English
Helmut Jahn was an endlessly inventive, persistently evolving architect in possession of astounding nerve and unflagging creative exuberance. An interview from June 2016, conducted in Jahn’s Chicago office, sheds light on his approach to design, his personal evolution as an architect, and the challenges facing the contemporary city.
(c) Nathan Eddy
Nathan Eddy is an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist specializing in architecture and urban planning issues. His first two films, The Absent Column and Starship Chicago, document the struggle to protect Chicago’s architectural heritage. In 2017, Eddy organized and led the successful protest movement to landmark New York City’s epochal postmodern skyscraper, Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building.
MODERNISM AS CHARACTER is a three-part series of screenings, conversations and discussions, featuring Modernist design, buildings, landscapes, allied arts and ideas organized by Docomomo Chicago and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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