John O’Dowd’s Law Blog

I just saw “Build Something Modern” at the Irish Film Institute. Nicky Gogan (one of the directors) and Lisa Godson (who had the initial idea for the film) took part in a Q&A after the screening.

I found the film to be challenging but rewarding viewing. Directed by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, it deals with then young Irish architects who, following in the footsteps of Pearse McKenna, built churches and other buildings, in a modernist style, for Irish missionary orders in Africa in the 1959s and 1960s. It does so largely through an animated architectural archive which frames and comments upon interviews with some of the architects and missionaries concerned. In this, the directors took their inspiration from the slideshow which begins the film. As the directors explicitly intended, the film is concerned with the memories and archives of the Irish participants in the story who are now back in Ireland in retirement and there are no African voices (except for one reading extracts from the work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew) nor even present-day location filming of the buildings concerned. Among the main themes of the film are the adaptations of modernist architecture to a humid tropical climate and to local African culture and ways of working.

I enjoyed the way in which the material was presented, which was often quite meditative; others might find it hard going in parts.

Continues nightly at the IFI up to 31 May. http://bit.ly/mQtzDg