Film starts and Modernist houses in ARCHILIFE, by Federico Babina

11/11/2014. Architectural Ilustration
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA

Federico Babina is back with a new illustration series, this time with movie stars including Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Marlon Brando make themselves at home in Modernist masterpieces by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and more.

Archilife by Federico Babina.

Film director – Alfred Hitchcock is depicted in the bathroom of the Villa Savoye.

Archilife by Federico Babina.

Federico Babina is an Italian architect and illustrator and with his new Archilife series proposes us 17 pairs between Hollywood film stars and famous architect-designed residences of the 20th century. Babina shows us the stars living their daily routines in these homes, from Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House to the Ricarda House by Bonet Castellana. Pairs from Marilyn Monroe lounging on a daybed inside Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House to Michael Caine vacuuming the carpet inside the Esherick House by Louis Kahn.

Each image shows the actor in the middle of some domestic activity, so Hepburn can be found meditating on a rug within the Eames house, while Cary Grant is ironing a shirt inside Oscar Niemeyer's Casa de Canoas. ”I have never liked the lack of life in the architectural representations that are often aseptic, clean and neutral,” explains Babina. “I often enjoy imagining what life would be like in these static images.” “the banality of everyday life” and adds “We are used to perceiving and reading architecture as a set of almost metaphysical spaces. In a similar way we see the actors as characters and not as people.”

"Who better than some of the myths of cinema to help me animate these scenes and to play themselves into a frame of an ordinary day?" said Babina.

A final detail that can be spotted throughout the series is the addition of artwork on the walls of the buildings. On closer inspection, these are revealed as images from Babina's Archiportraits series.