In the 8th chapter of the first season of House of Cards, we probably attend to the only moment in the whole season when Frank Underwood is trully moved in front of the sharp lens of the cameras.
“Nothing is permanent, not even this building (…)
I don´t mean to sound ungrateful. I´m very grateful, I´m deeply honored and I am very moved.
I had the good fortune to spend the last weekend with a group of friends, friends I haven´t seen in a very long time (…)
I wish I could describe…
Harmony that’s the word that’s stuck in my mind, its not about what’s lasting or permanent, it’s about individual voices coming together for a moment … and that moment lasts the length of a breath… that´s what I think about my time here.”
The episode takes place at Santinell Military College, where Francis has gone for the inaguration of a library named after him: The Francis J. Underwood Library. Throughout the story, the main character asks himself about the meaning of that building for him, what the old library, that now is going to be replaced by the one one built on a chain of favors, meant to him. “Do you think this place made us? ” he asks to an old friend, while both are seating on the drunkenness and the dusty darkness of the old building .
What was the role of that marble floor that ascends the columns with neoclasical attitude, the white walls where big iron chandeliers reflects their lights and shadows, the bookselfs and desk on walnut wood with its small flexo lamps. A decoration that aims nostalgia from the first day, that in this scene harmonizes one of those moments which Frank refers in his speech.
A house of cards of the lenght of a breath with a backdrop... Many times I wonder how deep the everyday landscape that surrounds us can get: the faculty building where we studied with their red bricks, the terrazzo floor of those streets we walked in our childhood that we even touched with our own hands sometimes, the cork walls of the primary school, the white lamp of our bedroom whose shadows come alive during slepless nights. A scenario that wraps us daily only separated by our thin skin.
In the same chapter, Peter Russo and Christina talk in the bedroom where Peter grew up on a bed that was lame after the ravages of his adolescence. She asks for the crack in the ceiling:
"You see that crack up in the ceiling?
I used to fall asleep staring at it every night
I know every inch and curve."
This exquisite series shapes its scenes with sublime architecture and frames... One of those frames is the window of the Westwood's House, where the couple douse the lights that have been turned on during the day. I wonder if those decisions, taken between the smoke of that cigarette lit by the neighbor's lamp (which lights every day at 6.45 am), would have been different with another background.
The White House, probably the only place where the scenes are bright, white. The place where official events take place in front of the public eye. The rest of Frank's scenes happen, mostly, under a halo of darkness.
Freddy´s BBQ joint, Frank's secret place. A tiny corner where his hands can get dirty without using leather gloves. The authenticity of this place is that the owner doesn't care about being trendy or even pretend to be. A bubble of re-used oil on the superficiality that surrounds the White House.
In a town where everyone is so carefully reinventing themselves, what I like about Freddy is that he doesn´t even pretend to change
That no-place, the heterotopia that represents the car moving in the big city streets.
Zoe's shabby apartment, with its door to the fire stairs, that serves as an escape valve for the tension created in certain scenes. An apartment where Zoe traps insects in wine glasses in order to put them under her landlord's door.
¿Do places make us or are we the ones that shape those places, the ones that leave that crystal ashtray on the window ledge, that big night lamp that offers little light, a half empty wine glass on the floor, a cellphone that vibrates due to a message that the others shouldn't see, the dirty plastic on a window that is not worth fixing, the glasses on a newspaper of the day..?
I think of architecture more and more as blank walls, where users will hang the images that will frame their lives. And thus, I am worried about new suburban architecture, or new technologies because they seem to leave no place for those scattered objects that create our homes.