Daniel @danielkomonyi - Twitter Profile

2 months ago

I’m making a TV show! Here’s why: When I was moving to New York, I told my leasing agent that I wanted a place with charm and character. She told me that if that’s what I want, I need to look for apartments built before World War II. “So you’re saying we’ve basically built nothing with charm and character in the past 80 years?” “That’s right.” This is happening all over the world. The same boring and generic style has spread to the entire world. 150 years ago, new buildings in Shanghai looked nothing like the ones in Rome or Tokyo or San Francisco or Buenos Aires. The architecture of each place was as varied as the landscape itself. And it’s not just the sameness of the modern world that has me scratching my head, but also the carelessness behind so much of what’s built these days. We boast about the triumphs of technology and how advanced we are as a civilization, but why has our built environment regressed so much? Shouldn’t we use our wealth to make our streets more charming and delightful? There’s lots of talk about how we’ve polluted the natural world, but what about how we’ve polluted the man-made world? We’ve filled our streets with ugly railings, benches, lampposts, and clutter. We assume these things have to be boring, but they don’t. Good design can make everything, even bins and bus stops, charming. New things can be prettier than old things. The first step is believing it’s possible. Something has changed. We’ve taken a dramatic turn, and the majority of people prefer what we used to build to what we build today. Just look at where people take photos. In New York it’s the steps of brownstones in the West Village; in San Francisco it’s the old Victorian homes; in London there’s tourists galore in front of those iconic red phone booths which remain on the streets, even though they don’t work anymore, because they’re so nicely designed that people like having them there. All this is what inspired me to make a TV show. First: a pilot episode which now has 5.4 million views, 23,000 comments, and 379,000 likes. It also has 241,000 YouTube subscribers from that one video, which is just about unheard of for a new channel. And now: a full-on, six-episode series. But when I pitched Hollywood on the idea, they said cultural series of this sort don’t work: “The only kinds of documentaries that get funded are about sports, music, nature, or true crime.” Huh? How can that be? People are interested in culture. The problem is most culture documentaries are terrible. They fail in one of two ways: (1) people dumb down the ideas in patronizing ways, or (2) people use so much jargon and high-falutin language that it becomes boring and inaccessible. This is why I’m producing this work. It’ll be called The Modern World, and it’ll be a tour of art & architecture through the eyes of Sheehan Quirke, who goes by @culturaltutor. It’s our ambition to do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world. To use cinematic imagery and simple language in a way that everybody can understand. And to be rigorous, but not in a way that feels like school or your know-it-all friend who never stops talking. The potential here is huge. Architecture impacts literally every person on earth. What we build shapes the moods of people and the spirit of our culture. We’ll film in six countries (the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States) to produce six 30-minute episodes which we hope to publish on a major streaming service. We��re currently in the fundraising stage, and production begins once we’ve raised the money. It’s our mission to help people see the world more clearly, and in turn, make the world a more charming and delightful place to live in.

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Daniel

@DanielKomonyi

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