David Hartt

A reflection on the iconic headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company in downtown Chicago. The eleven-story Modernist building on South Michigan Avenue was home to Jet and Ebony magazines since its design in 1971. The building was heralded as the first major downtown Chicago building designed by an African-American architect since the eighteenth century. In the case of the Johnson family and its legacy, Hartt looks to the intersection of the publisher’s ideals and values, the style and aesthetics embodied by the site and the lasting cultural impact of the magazines.

Hartt’s film Et in Arcadia Ego, commissioned by The Glass House, responds to Philip Johnson’s mid-century modern residence and the surrounding landscape.

Directed by David Hartt

Video essay, locations alternating between Greece and Detroit, footage between HD digital and CGI.

The Garden addresses a recurring theme for David Hartt: the historically determined world that we call "natural" and tend to consider as lying beyond the flow of time. Through stop-action cinematography Hartt makes time palpable and eerie, turning the passage of seconds into a dystopian stutter.

David Hartt’s film in the forest revisits Habitat Puerto Rico, an unfinished project conceived by Moshe Safdie in 1968. Launched just one year after Safdie completed Habitat ‘67, Habitat Puerto Rico was one of several iterations of that visionary project that the architect developed for New York, Israel, and Singapore, among other cities. Nearly fifty years after Habitat Puerto Rico was launched, in the forest returns to its sites, as well as a number of remote locations around the island where modules have been abandoned or repurposed. Investigating the relationship between ideology, architecture, and the environment, Hartt’s meditative film captures the remains of Safdie’s project and offers a pensive study of this unrealized architectural experiment, recontextualized within the political and economic struggles of contemporary Puerto Rico.