Suh’s panoramic film, Robin Hood Gardens, Woolmore Street, London E14 0HG, is both site-specific and time-specific – a document of the Smithsons’ modular interiors as they have been adapted, decorated and furnished by residents. Suh used time-lapse photography, drone footage, 3D-scanning and photogrammetry to create a visual journey in which the camera ceaselessly pans through and around the building. It is a meditation on home, memory and displacement within a physical structure that is on the verge of demolition, less that fifty years after the architects’ utopian vision was realised.

Given access to four flats, three of which were still lived in, Suh conducted intensive scanning and photography of each of these spaces. He took hundreds of shots, which he then stitched together to create the effect of an animation. (It took eight hours to photograph each apartment, and 30 minutes to move his camera on a track between the floor and the ceiling of each room to take 300 photographs, which is speeded up to 30 seconds in the final film.) Meanwhile, photogrammetry allowed him to capture and map the visual information of the room against which these photographs were placed.

The result is a visual journey in which the camera seems to pan vertically and horizontally through the building, moving seamlessly from one space to another.
The film’s steady, contemplative pace and constant, frontal viewpoint function as a framework within which the myriad details that denote differences of taste, style, culture or circumstance of each flat are revealed. The camera moves along the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, which is punctuated by acoustic fins, down its ‘streets in the sky’, through its doors and windows, and along its rooms, thereby revealing the plan of each apartment and the detritus of the lives lived there.

In his films and sculptural works, Suh often uses the idea of movement to convey a distinct emotional register; a sense of being in flux, crossing boundaries, or travelling between psychological states. As part of his dialogue with the residents, the artist asked each to sit in their favourite chair; the sustained motion of the film accentuates the feeling of transition that they are experiencing and heightens the sense of imminence. The artist has said that he was interested in the ‘intangible quality’ of Robin Hood Gardens as much as its architectural shell, the ‘energy, history, life and memory that has accumulated [there].’

The piece was widely praised for its innovative and engaging way of representing architecture, and it featured in several roundups of the best things to see at the Biennale. In The Observer, Rowan Moore wrote that the ‘exquisite film by the Korean Do Ho Suh, using techniques reminiscent of both architectural cross-sections and the stripping away of the demolition process, records the outer form and inner spaces of the estate on the point of its disappearance.’