The Learn’d

The Learn’d is a short film we made for Dutch architect Kees Kaan. His office Kaan Architecten was nominated for the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award with their beautiful Education Center and he asked us to portray the building.

In an empty building, a temple of knowledge, movement is detected. Two people in their youth, desperate for meaning, are looking for human contact in a world of facts and figures. The beautiful words of “When I heard the learn’d astronomer”, Walt Whitman’s poem, accompany the stunning imaginary and convey the need to explore reality rather than science, to be human first, and a learn’d after.
The film makers feel that, after decades of modernism, at the service both of the free market and the public realm, the building represents architecture’s return to humanism.

The Learn’d has been realized in occasion of the shortlist nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2015 and will be part of the exhibition that opened its doors on May 8th, 2015 at the MUHBA Oliva Artés center in Barcelona.

Published: May 2015
Client: Kaan Architecten
Building: Education Center Erasmus MC
Director: Victor Vroegindeweij
Director of photography: Mick van Dantzig
Styling: Ilanka Verhoeven
Camera assistant: Vincent van Willigen
Gripper: Antoine Petiet
Runner: Rick Peters
Sound design: Diederik Idenburg @ Most
Production: The Office for Nonfiction Storytelling
Karen Barnhoorn

Download press release and images here.