The European Rooms

In this sealed, stifling world, humans and things alike seem victims of a spell, as in the kind of dreams where one feels guided by some fatal inevitability, where it would be as futile to try to change the slightest detail as to run away.†

The European Rooms is a short film by David K. Ross that presents intimate views of Enlightenment-era architectural interiors featured in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Room collection. In this work, an unhurried camera glides by bedrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. Though well- appointed, this ‘sealed and stifling’ world of privilege, class, and prestige is also inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

Image: Film still from The European Rooms (2014) 27:00 mins, hd. Editon of five.

Housed in the basement of the Art Institute of Chicago is a gallery containing the seventy extraordinarily small rooms that comprise the Thorne Rooms collection. Commissioned, designed and built by the Chicago heiress Mrs. James Ward Thorne, these rooms — each about the size of a banker’s box — provide visitors to the Art Insti-tute with an overview of European and North American architectural history, from the middle ages to the first half of the 20th century, one diminutive room at a time. Installed in a long, low ceilinged exhibition space dedi-cated exclusively to their presentation, each of the rooms are set directly into the walls of the hallway-like gallery. The small rooms are arranged such that they must be viewed one at a time through framed panes of protective glass. A combination of precise, subtle lighting and exacting detail at such a small scale (1 inch = 1 foot) produces a disorienting shift in spacial comprehension, not unlike sitting in the last row of a grand theatre where furniture and sets appear to be small only by virtue of their distance.

Pursuing an architectural practice writ small, Mrs. Thorne spent vast sums and most of the 1930’s and 1940’s rendering these uncanny effects. Supervising every aspect of production, she hired European cabinet makers, plasterers and upholsterers during the Depression to practice their trades, not as they were accustomed, but in petite, proxy versions, to exacting standards. Mrs. Thorne was a fantasist who demanded vérité.

Propelled by curiosity and powered by pedestrian means, visitors to the gallery experience the rooms as if they were single frames on a roll of film, each supplying a different scene, a discrete moment in time. Decidedly cinematic, this linear presentation of the rooms in the Art Institute’s gallery space serves as the formal and conceptual starting point for The European Rooms. Comprised of a single tracking shot, the camera assumes our role as visitor; its lens becomes our eye, its track our feet. Our ears hear only room tones captured through a highly sensitive measurement microphone used to record subtle sounds inside each of the spaces. When, finally, we arrive at the film’s coda — an extended static shot of a chandelier whose pendulous movement is barely perceived — its movement necessitates futher inquiry: did the camera set this light in motion, did sound, or through the simiple act of observation, did we ?

David K. Ross, Chicago 2014

† Script notes for Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1962

project context

The European Rooms Film Stills

The European Rooms Film Stills

The European Rooms

A measurement microphone was locked inside each room and used to gather room tone recordings.

Miniature score on a miniature music stand in one of the miniature rooms. This Chopin-esque decora-tive music was transcribed and played on the viola for the film’s soundtrack.

(L+R) Filming in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Miniature Rooms

Production Stills

The European Rooms

Production stills

It is very easy to think of The Thorne Miniature Rooms as a collection of collections. Museums are really just scale models of the world anyway… the Thorne Rooms just happen to be an acute version of that principle. The project is about scale in a temporal, sonic fashion too of course (the viola you hear is playing some minia-ture sheet music we found in one of the rooms during filming).

I like to think T.E.R. sits as a kind of fulcrum between the rarified and largely male Modernist aesthetic (Mies, Snow et al), and a less tidy version of those traditions; an unheimliched (sic) structuralism. Mies and Thorne were almost exact contemporaries--born and died about a year from each other. Both worked in Chicago. The were most certainly exact opposites too; fighting for a version

of the world they each thought most correct-- History and Tradition vs The Future and Modernity; this project puts those causes in the same room(s) and lets us pick up the battle.

Below are a few images that I used when talking about The European Rooms at the Graham… including at the bottom, the one I was talking about which shows a measurement mic inside one of the rooms. We made room tone recordings by locking this mic inside each of the miniatures with the glass fronts closed… then fed those recording through convolution impulse response software to model the sound to each of the the spaces. My sound designer on the project Doug Moffat also found a miniature score on a miniature music stand so we had that transposed to *real life size* -- turned out to be a combination of Chopin-esque and nonsense -- and had a concert violinist play the music.... that recording appears a couple of times in the video.

The European Rooms sits as a kind of fulcrum between the rarified and largely male Modernist aesthetic (Mies, Snow et al), and a messier version of those traditions;

an unheimliched (sic) structuralism. Mies and Thorne were almost exact contemporaries--born and died about a year from each other. Both worked in Chicago. They were most certainly exact opposites too; fighting for a version of the world they each thought most correct-- history and Tradition vs the future and Modernity; The European Rooms puts those causes in the same room(s) and lets us pick up the battle!

The European Rooms

Interview with Rob Stone and Kevin B. LeeIt is very easy to think of The Thorne Miniature Rooms as a collection of collections. I often make the point in discussing the project that museums are really just scales models of the world anyway… the Thorne Rooms just happen to be an acute version of that principle (along with the collection of maquettes for mid-century public art project in the Loop). The project is about scale in a temporal, sonic fashion too of course (the viola you hear is playing some miniature sheet music we found in one of the rooms during filming).

I like to think T.E.R. sits as a kind of fulcrum between the rarified and largely male Modernist aesthetic (Mies, Snow et al), and a less tidy version of those traditions; an unheimliched (sic) structuralism. Mies and Thorne were almost exact contemporaries--born and died about a year from each other. Both worked in Chicago. The were most certainly exact opposites too; fighting for a version of the world they each thought most correct-- History and Tradition vs The Future and Modernity; this project puts those causes in the same room(s) and lets us pick up the battle.

The European Rooms

It is very easy to think of The Thorne Miniature Rooms as a collection of collections. I often make the point in discussing the project that museums are really just scales models of the world anyway… the Thorne Rooms just happen to be an acute version of that principle (along with the collection of maquettes for mid-century public art project in the Loop). The project is about scale in a temporal, sonic fashion too of course (the viola you hear is playing some miniature sheet music we found in one of the rooms during filming).

I like to think T.E.R. sits as a kind of fulcrum between the rarified and largely male Modernist aesthetic (Mies, Snow et al), and a less tidy version of those traditions; an unheimliched (sic) structuralism. Mies and Thorne were almost exact contemporaries--born and died about a year from each other. Both worked in Chicago. The were most certainly exact opposites too; fighting for a version of the world they each thought most correct-- History and Tradition vs The Future and Modernity; this project puts those causes in the same room(s) and lets us pick up the battle.

The European Rooms

The European Rooms

The European Rooms

The European Rooms

The European Rooms

The European Rooms