‘Spirit’ is a photo-essay combining a fictional text with a series of documentary images of the concrete outdoor projection screen designed for the roof of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. The monumentality of the screen was used to explore the capacity video has to move us to agreement, to immerse us and to produce what we understand to be our commonality. This work was underpinned by readings of cinematic space as architectural field, leading to the notion that social life may be figured as cinematic territory. ‘Spirit’ was developed from a conference paper presented at ‘Vicissitudes Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis’ (University of London, 2008).
The work produced through this research became the catalyst for ‘Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy’, resulting in a further publication and symposium (Site Gallery, 2011). This was followed by an invitation to speak at the symposium ‘British Modern Remade – Style. Design. Glamour. Horror’, organised in conjunction with the exhibition ‘British Modern Remade’ (2012) in Sheffield’s Park Hill Estate, one of Europe’s largest listed modernist buildings.
This research project also includes Tegel: Flights of Fancy (2012) and Tegel: Speculations and Propositions (2013), which examined the pending closure of Tegel airport. Here the hexagonal concrete design of the terminal was taken as a case study for artists, curators, and writers for considering new approaches to the problems of urban renewal, regeneration, social organisation, mobility and the legacy of modernist architecture. For this project, Joseph-Lester interviewed Tegel Airport’s architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, co-wrote the publication introduction, selected artists and writers, and contributed a new video work. Other contributors included Dr Peter Abey and Dr Ricarda Vidal, curators Maja Ćirić and Elke Falat; fiction writers Sean Ashton and Norman M. Klein. The publication included a DVD of films selected from ‘Tegel: Flights of Fancy’.