David Hurtado: 2 Films
by Dr. Tina di Carlo

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‘I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism. Instead, I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art.’ So begins Robert Venturi in 1962 for his landmark 1966 Museum of Modern Art publication Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as the first (and only) publication in the short-lived series Papers in Architecture. Almost 60 years later, Roberto Hurtado seemingly responds in a mellifluous unscripted Spanish underlying Wine County (2024): ‘Landscape, for me, is in your mind—it is recording something in your mind that persists for a very long time. … [A]rchitecture is defined by place.’
David Hurtado: 2 Films pairs the young filmmaker’s first five-minute short Complexity & Contradiction (2023), which retraces Venturi’s steps and vistas through Rome narrated by Cashel Day-Lewis and starring Sylvie Field as Denise Scott Brown, with his second, Wine Country(2024), a 15-minute poetic rumination on Napa’s viticulture with a cogent view of the American and Californian landscapes—‘a meditation on its cultural and spiritual ties’, in Hurtado’s words. The narration by David’s father paces the film. Wine Country features in this year’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition Intelligens. Natural. Artifical. Collective curated by Carlo Ratti for La Biennale di Venezia. Viewed in conversation, the two films bookend, like the excerpts above, the discourse of architecture over the last six decades, addressing pressing issues of environment, landscape, immigration, people (gens) and a view into film making as a practice of architecture.
From the spatial filmic caresses of Hurtado’s painterly lens, coupled with Joji Baratelli’s cinematography and Field’s creative support, fragments and clips of architecture obliquely silhouette. Rotate. Outline form against the sky. Complex, ambiguous, contradictory. Through the rolling, starkly industrialised landscapes of Napa, panning, tempo, rhythm, tone, view, music, voice, choreography, movement, sequence, frame, editing, pauses, conjure an architecture of cinematography. Wine Country exposes the apparatus of wine making in which Mexican migration and environment enter, alongside immigration, climate, its change, labour, technology, the depths of solitude, cultural tropes and markers. An engagement with, and attachment to, landscape. The film enters through the nineteenth-century American painter and proto-environmentalist Thomas Cole’s (1801–1848) The Oxbow (1836) to sequence through a series of musings: Landscape. Water. Architecture. Factory. Mexico. Home. Jesus. Eden. Fire. American dream. Earth. Pauses interleaf. Spanish in voice and song, Bach, echo, over- and underlay, infusing a heightened synaesthetic sens.
Whether intentional or not, Hurtado’s pairing harkens to Derrida’s late twentieth-century prescience. Eschewing architecture as historicist urge, fashion, period or even era, as ‘neither a modernist signal, nor even a salute to post-modernity’ he suggests instead architecture as ‘an experience of spacing … marked by’ and as ‘sequence, open series, narrativity, the cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography’. Derrida predicted architecture would become ‘no longer a closed, identifiable and specific field’ and ‘be confronted with being more than building design, or buildings. Consequently, it must be explored,’ he wrote, ‘with having to do with relationships, urbanism of course, but moving beyond to what one calls “culture in general”: the architecture of the cinema, the architecture of literature or philosophy, and so forth.’ Historical, political, filmic, timely and sublime, these films recall the relationship of which Derrida speaks; they look towards naturescultures and the environment, issues more pressing now than a year ago when they were made.
Representation and, or as, architecture beyond convention also enters. It heeds Dalibor Vesely’s early stance: ‘Representation does not imply that something merely stands in for something else as if it were a replacement or substitute that enjoys a less authentic, more indirect kind of existence.’ Rather representation ‘coincides with the essential nature of making, and in particular with the making of our world.’ Hurtado is committed to its materiality, the images that comprise our world, and it comprises. Moving images, whether shot on 16mm acetate film or digitally, conjure, immerse us in its elusive, temporalities. To say these two films bookend architecture is not to suggest a progression from form to field to participation, spatial tactics, and environment, nor architecture’s dilution or hybridisation: Hurtado himself confesses he prefers the adjacency of disciplines to their fusion. Rather it suggests a way of seeing. From Husserl to current phenomenological positions through Colin St John Wilson’s ‘other tradition’ and beyond, architectures of place resonate. Spatialities and environmentalities—landscapes and climates as terrains, plateaus, through which we move and touch—touch and move us. Seeing is embodied and embodies. It draws and is drawn. From place, time, weather, wear, experiences, longings, passages, making, political and spatial apparatuses, relations, people, visible and obscured, said and unsaid.
Venturi proclaimed: ‘I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for [messy] vitality as well as validity’—duality and richness rather than clarity of meaning. Ratti’s entrance to the Arsenale bombards one with the urgency of climate change through a claustrophobic darkened room of whirring, suspended air conditioners mirrored in pools of water. It suggests responses through a cacophony of technology of natures. Hurtado’s films, refreshingly, embrace Venturi’s messy vitality quietly. Thoughtfully, poignantly, the seemingly dissimilar paradox of things exists side by side, and their very incongruity, lends a critical insight to open a kind of truth. In the words of his father, ‘La Tierra llama’. The Earth calls.

The Heong Gallery, Cambridge
May 2025

Notes

‘I like complexity … inherent in art’: Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture with an introduction by Vincent Scully (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Papers in Architecture), 1966, p 22.

‘Landscape for me …is defined by place’: Roberto Hurtado in Wine Country, directed by David Hurtado (Hurda 2023), 00:24–00:36, 01:50–01:52.

‘apparatus’: Michael Foucault, ‘Confessions of the Flesh’ in Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books), 1980, pp 194–228. Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishi and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, as part of Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics), 2009.

‘sens’: Marie-Eve Morin, Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being at the Limits of Phenomenology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), p. 13.

‘proto-environmentalist’: Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Alan C. Braddock, ‘Spotlight: Reimagining the Wilderness Aesthetic: What’s missing from Cole’s environmentalism is the idea of justice’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 6th April 2022. Accessed 8th May 2025: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/oxbow-questioning-romantic-wilderness.

‘historicist urge … post-modernity’: Jacques Derrida, Bernard Tschumi, Le Case Vide, La Villette, 1985 (London: Architecture Association Folios), 1985, pp 4–5.

‘an experience of spacing …choreography’: Derrida, pp. 4–5.

‘no longer a closed … and so forth’: Jacques Derrida, Chora-L Works, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), pp 170.

‘natures cultures’ drawing on ‘naturecultures’: Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press), 2003 and When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2008.

‘Representation does not imply … a more indirect kind of existence’: Dalibor Vesely, Representation in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge and London: MIT Press), p 13.

‘coincides with the essential … making of our world’: Vesely, p 13.

‘current phenomenological positions’: See, for example, the wealth of current material including Brian Norwood, ed. ‘Disorienting Phenomenology’ Log 42 (Winter Spring 2018), Marie-Eve Morin (2022), and Tao DuFour (2023), to name a few.

‘the other tradition’: Colin St John Wilson, The other tradition of modern architecture: the uncompleted project (London: Academy Editions), 1995.

‘spatialities, environmentalities’: Tao DuFour, Husserl and Spatiality (London: Routledge), 2022; ‘Environmentality: A Phenomenology of Generative Space in Husserl’ in Research in Phenomenology 53 (2023), pp 331–358 ((https://brill.com/view/journals/rip/53/3/article-p331_3.xml?ebody=pdf-96202: published online 25 October 2023); and Possible Landscapes (2022).

‘plateaus, mountains, terrains’: inspired by Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta), 2003; Robert Macfarlane in Conversations Around Drawing, organised by Tina di Carlo with Thomas Wilkison and Mabel Oliver, 17 April 2025, The Heong Gallery, Downing College, University of Cambridge; Maurice Herzog (1951), Annupurna. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952); and Nan Sheperd, The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Cannongate Books), 2019.

‘said and unsaid’: Jacques Ranciere (2003), The Future of the Image trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso), 2007.

‘I welcome …vitality as well as validity’: Venturi, p 22.

‘La Tierra llama’: Hurtado, Wine Country, 10:09–10:14.

David Hurtado Text, Information