Profile: Jan Kaplický

The Czech architect Jan Kaplický emigrated to London in 1968 and ten years later he co-founded the studio Future Systems, where he elaborates visions of future architecture. Future Systems was a British architectural agency that worked for NASA. Its unique experience in working on space research and its relevant knowledge of materials and technology continues to influence Kaplický’s work, which has won a number of prestigious awards.

The film was shot in the Czech Republic and in the UK, and it combines the artist’s comments with readings from his reflections included in his autobiography titled Confessions. A yellow plastic model of a future home, the beginning of form. The progress of form through the balance of human life in a retrospective view of buildings and structures, where the material is summoned by the film so as to reflect the creative activity of one man, whose life is dissolved in steel. The basic set-up of the narrative is entirely static in terms of external action, as what is relevant and palpable takes place on the surface of the things themselves, in the monologue of design, which is a unique expression of human effort in form, and it therefore acquires symbolic features. (source catalogue MFDF Jihlava)