Do the Images of Arquitectura Emocional 1959 Impress?

The images in Arquitectura emocional 1959 deliver a striking visual experience through innovative formal techniques that transform architecture into narrative. Director León Siminiani’s 2022 short film won the 2023 Goya Award partly because its cinematography makes buildings speak with emotional weight.

Architecture as Visual Protagonist

Most films treat buildings as backdrop. Siminiani reverses this completely. His 29-minute film positions Madrid’s architecture as the primary character, with human subjects Andrea and Sebastián moving through spaces that dictate their emotional journey. This radical approach creates images where every frame carries architectural significance.

The film achieves this through deliberate visual choices. Cinematographers Víctor Benavides and Giuseppe Truppi captured Secundino Zuazo’s buildings from angles that emphasize spatial relationships over human action. A senatorial apartment building near El Retiro Park and a workers’ housing project in northern Madrid become visual metaphors for class division. These aren’t merely locations – they’re compositional anchors that structure every shot.

What makes this work is restraint. Rather than overwhelming viewers with stylized cinematography, the film presents architecture in its existing state. Weathered facades, functional stairwells, and public benches receive the same careful framing as dramatic set pieces. This approach allows the buildings’ inherent emotional properties to emerge naturally.

The Anachronism Technique

The film’s most distinctive visual strategy involves temporal layering. Siminiani films contemporary Madrid in color while the narrative is set in 1958-1959. Modern graffiti appears behind characters in period costume. Traffic flows past locations described in voiceover as they appeared six decades ago. This creates a visual paradox that keeps viewers constantly aware they’re watching constructed cinema.

Archive footage from NO-DO newsreels intensifies this effect. Black-and-white propaganda images of Franco’s Spain showing the new University City architecture appear in stark contrast to digital color footage of the same locations today. The cuts between these visual modes aren’t subtle transitions – they’re deliberate ruptures that force viewers to see architecture across time simultaneously.

This technique serves a specific purpose beyond aesthetic novelty. By refusing to recreate 1959 Madrid through sets or digital effects, Siminiani makes architecture’s permanence the film’s central visual theme. Buildings outlast political systems, relationships, and even the medium of film itself. The images impress not through technical wizardry but through this conceptual clarity.

Cartographic Precision

Another visual element that elevates the film involves its use of maps, plans, and diagrams. Hand-drawn architectural plans appear as transitions between scenes. Red lines trace routes through Madrid streets on period-style maps. Aerial shots track character movements with arrow overlays that recall architectural presentations.

These insertions transform the viewing experience from passive observation to active spatial analysis. When Andrea walks from her apartment to the university, viewers don’t just watch her move – they understand the exact distance traversed, the urban fabric crossed, the class boundaries navigated. The poster itself is a annotated map marking locations A through I with emotional significance.

This cartographic layer adds intellectual engagement to visual impact. The images don’t just show beautiful or dramatic compositions – they teach viewers to read space as social text. A seven-kilometer journey between two Zuazo buildings becomes a measured exploration of architectural meaning.

Architectural Memory and Absence

Some of the film’s most powerful images show empty spaces. When Andrea undresses for Sebastián in a service stairwell, the camera doesn’t follow the human action. Instead, it holds on the empty architectural space where this intimate moment occurred. The building itself becomes the repository of memory.

This approach appears repeatedly. A solitary bench where the couple first met receives extended shots without people present. Corridors, doorways, and courtyards are filmed as if the architecture remembers what happened within it. These images work because they ask viewers to imagine rather than showing everything directly.

The technique connects to a broader visual philosophy: architecture outlasts human experience. The buildings Zuazo designed in the 1920s and 1950s stood witness to countless personal dramas. The film’s images capture this quality of architectural permanence watching temporary human emotion.

The NO-DO Counterpoint

Early in the film, propaganda footage from Franco’s dictatorship celebrates the functional modernity of University City. An enthusiastic narrator describes rational spaces for Spain’s youth. The images show clean lines, purposeful design, triumphant modernism.

Siminiani immediately cuts to contemporary footage: the same architecture now weathered, surrounded by urban sprawl, marked by graffiti and time. This visual juxtaposition does more than show change. It reveals how architectural images can be weaponized for political narratives, then reclaimed by actual use and memory.

The NO-DO footage provides constant visual irony throughout the film. Its optimistic framing and dramatic camera angles contrast with Siminiani’s matter-of-fact contemporary cinematography. Both approaches photograph the same buildings, but the visual rhetoric completely differs. This layering makes viewers aware of how we’re trained to see architecture through ideological lenses.

Emotional Composition

Despite the intellectual framework, individual frames carry genuine emotional weight. A shot of Andrea and Sebastián walking through autumn Madrid streets, their body language showing tentative connection while massive apartment blocks loom behind them, captures intimacy against urban anonymity. Another sequence follows their routes through the city with overhead tracking shots that emphasize separation – she walks east, he walks west, architecture determines their paths.

The cinematography uses classical techniques – deep focus, symmetrical framing, careful attention to light – but applies them to subjects usually treated as background. A stairwell receives the compositional reverence typically reserved for landscapes. A building facade is lit and shot with the care of a portrait.

This elevation of architectural detail into emotional register works because the film earns it through narrative structure. By the time viewers reach later images, they’ve learned to read buildings as character. A simple shot of Zuazo’s senatorial building facade carries the weight of class barriers, parental judgment, and social immobility. The architecture photographs itself, but viewers now see emotional architecture.

Technical Achievement

The film was shot over three years, capturing the same locations across different seasons. This patient approach shows in the images’ quality. Light changes across buildings as months pass. The same bench appears in autumn leaves and winter bareness. This temporal documentation adds depth to seemingly static architectural photography.

The color grading maintains naturalistic tones while ensuring visual consistency across the extended shooting period. Archival integration required matching grain structure and contrast ratios between 1950s newsreel footage and contemporary digital capture. These technical challenges are handled with sufficient skill that most viewers won’t notice the difficulty – they’ll simply experience coherent visual storytelling.

Critical Reception and Impact

When Arquitectura emocional 1959 won the Goya Award in February 2023, critics specifically praised its visual innovation. Reviews described the formal decisions as “a visual pleasure” and noted how the film makes architecture “the content, not the container.” Film festivals including Rotterdam and Valladolid highlighted its unique approach to spatial cinematography.

The film’s 7.1 IMDb rating and positive critical consensus stems largely from how successfully the images execute Siminiani’s conceptual ambitions. This isn’t a film where experimental technique overwhelms narrative. The images serve clear purposes while maintaining aesthetic appeal.

Comparison to Architectural Cinema

Other films have foregrounded architecture as character. Medianeras (2011) explored how Buenos Aires urban design shapes relationships. Un efecto óptico (2020) examined how filming transforms architectural spaces. Arquitectura emocional 1959 distinguishes itself by making the architectural focus explicit from the title forward, then delivering images that justify that emphasis.

Unlike purely architectural documentaries, Siminiani’s film maintains narrative drive. Unlike typical romantic dramas, it refuses to subordinate architectural detail to human story. This balance between competing demands creates images that work on multiple registers simultaneously.

Does It Actually Impress?

The question deserves a direct answer: yes, but with specificity about what impresses and who might be impressed. If you expect spectacular cinematography in the conventional sense – dramatic lighting, sweeping camera movements, visual flourishes – you’ll find some of that but it’s not the primary mode.

The images impress through conceptual coherence. Every visual decision serves the film’s thesis that architecture shapes emotion silently but powerfully. The mixing of temporal registers, the cartographic insertions, the emphasis on empty spaces – these techniques combine into a unified vision that feels genuinely original.

For viewers interested in architecture, urban studies, or experimental film form, the images will likely impress considerably. The film offers a masterclass in using cinema to make buildings visible as active participants in human life. For audiences seeking conventional visual storytelling, the approach may feel too conceptual, too distanced, too focused on ideas over emotional immediacy.

The Goya Award and festival recognition suggest the images impressed film professionals who value formal innovation. The film’s limited commercial release but strong critical reception indicates niche appeal executed at high quality. Three years of careful filming paid off in images that achieve exactly what they intend – no more, no less.

Practical Viewing Considerations

The film runs 29 minutes, which provides enough time for visual language to establish itself without overstaying experimental premises. Viewers can watch on Filmin, Movistar+, and select festival screenings. The short runtime and availability make it accessible for those curious whether the images will impress them personally.

Because the film makes its visual strategies explicit through voiceover and insertions, viewers don’t need specialized knowledge to understand what they’re seeing. Siminiani essentially provides a running commentary on his own technique. This accessibility paradoxically makes the experimental approach more successful – viewers appreciate the craft because the film teaches them how to watch it.

Closing Perspective

Arquitectura emocional 1959 proves that images can impress through intellectual rigor as much as visual spectacle. The film’s cinematography transforms mundane architectural documentation into emotionally resonant cinema through careful framing, temporal layering, and conceptual clarity. Whether these images impress any particular viewer depends on openness to seeing buildings as protagonists rather than backgrounds. For those willing to engage with that premise, the film delivers visual innovation that justifies its Goya Award and critical acclaim.