The Architect Has Left The Building

The Architects Has Left The Building (TAHLTB) is an immersive dual-screen video and surround-sound audio installation by photographer Jim Stephenson, sound artist Simon James and visual artist Sofia Smith.

The film offers a series of cinematic vignettes that subtly document the ways that people use architecture when left to their own devices, weaving together moments of architectural joy and intimacy. It works at different scales to explore the idea and impact of a ‘shared place’ and the contextual detailing that makes them successful. In this form, it asks the audience to pause for a moment, and imagine the stories that are unfolding on the screen. At it’s heart, the film installation is an exercise in people watching.

The film is designed to encourage a slower consideration of architecture by showing how people engage with spaces. The installation features original footage of thirteen different buildings from around the UK. Each vignette is composed of long, uncut shots, encouraging the viewer to spend time watching life unfold in the frame. Nothing is posed. As such, the focus for the audience becomes about shape, texture and movement on the screen as the soundscape washes over them, enhancing their experience. The buildings in this sense, become a stage set for the stories that play out across the 20min film.

Footage is shown on a loop across two large scale screens in a diptych format with the multi-channel audio played in sync with the images; buildings overlap and flow into one another as the soundscape invites a deeper textural understanding and new visual connections are made.

Jim Stephenson and Simon James created the film drawing on their shared experiences of deep listening and looking practices and Sofia Smith led on the scene selection, image sequencing and editing. The audio piece Simon James created is integral, drawing all the featured projects together in a sonic environment that helps the audience connect on an almost unconscious level, combining on site field recordings, musical interludes and meticulously created foley. The deliberate spaciousness of the audio composition mirrors the installation's visual approach to slowness, creating resonant passages where audiences can attune to the subtle vibrational qualities of inhabited spaces that typically escape conscious awareness in our accelerated daily lives.

The work brings together musicians, commuters, dancers, worshippers, students, tourists, art lovers and more, capturing the creativity, conversations, performance and pauses that the buildings have facilitated. 

The Architect Has Left The Building was originally commissioned by the RIBA.