Artist:
Pia Rønicke (born 1974 in Roskilde, Denmark; lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark).

Materials:
Digital video; 26 min. .

Description:
“Pia Rønicke uses an interview with the conservator of Schindler house, Robert Sweeney, and a succession of photographs from the family’s private album to create a ‘virtual guided tour of the house’ which reveals as much about Sweeney’s personal relationship to it as ‘a labor of love’ than as a simple document about the history of the Schindler’s lifestyle and the house itself. The interview exposes the slippage between the building’s theoretical and intellectual success as an ideal communal and social space and its failure as a domestic space. However, in charting the break-up of the Schindlers’ marriage and the buildings dereliction—significantly Pauline Schindler described the house as ‘determining her life’—the film becomes a telling insight into the intense emotional relationship between domestic architecture and its inhabitants.”
—A New Stance for Tomorrow (London: sketch, 2008).

“…The Life of the Schindler House (2002) [describes] life in Rudolf Schindler’s famous Los Angeles building—it leaks, it’s too hot in summer and freezing in winter. In some ways, the film argues, it exists only on its own terms as a study in space and form yet in other aspects allows its inhabitants space and privacy.”
—Dan Fox, review of “To Imagine Action,” Lisson Gallery, London, Frieze, October 2, 2007.