Images Courtesy of ITV Global Entertainment Ltd & The British Film Institute
This House Believes We Have Lost Sight Of The Future
Regaining Vision




Francois Penz, University of Cambridge with Things To Come (1936)


Eric Parry, Eric Parry Architects with Street of Crocodiles (1935)


Sean Griffiths, Fashion Architecture Taste architects with Hindle Wakes (1927)


Emily Campbell, The Royal Society of Arts with Peter Ackroyd’s London (2004).
BFI, 17th November 2009
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François Penz
Eric Parry
Sean Griffiths
Emily Campbell
Directors have the art of visualising the future nailed. Film can at an instant make the utopian world tangible and provide the provocations to get us thinking, but why has the popular future become such an unobtainable place?
Architects once aligned themselves with the future, fusing their visions to political ideals and ambitions for a bolder tomorrow, but where is our contemporary vision coming from? Who is imagining tomorrow and what will be the drivers? Does our apparent anxiety in the future point towards a confusing set of messages and a lack of political will to invest in it? Is our future suffering from a lack of faith and leadership in the present? Can we regain it?
WIRED magazine with RIBA Building Futures host a multi-disciplinary evening fusing film, architecture and debate to reveal our ambitions for tomorrow. Chaired by WIRED’s editor at large Ben Hammersley with Land of Promise (1940) featuring contributions from François Penz, Reader in Architecture and the Moving Image at the University of Cambridge with Things To Come (1936), Stirling Prize nominated Eric Parry, founder and Co-Director of Eric Parry Architects, with Street of Crocodiles (1935), Sean Griffiths of fashion Architecture Taste FAT architects with Hindle Wakes (1927) and Emily Campbell of the Royal Society of Arts with Peter Ackroyd’s London (2004).
Part of the RIBA’s 175 Anniversary ‘Of Dreams and Cities’ architecture in film season at the BFI.
For more information on this event email: emma.emerson@inst.riba.org
