In 1959 New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Recounting her personal story as a young girl who spent her childhood in rehabilitation centres alongside her severely disabled father, Louise Lemoine confronts her traumatic memories with the exceptional experimentation developed at REHAB in Basel, a building built twenty years ago by Herzog & de Meuron.
Architecture is usually filmed from the outside, as an inanimate object. The few depictions of interiors are usually limited to still or static images of an empty building, reducing it to no more than an icon or sculpture. ‘REM’ uses an unconventional approach by combining the human stories and experience…
This documentary is a testimony of the construction of a very special building, the Botín Center for Arts & Culture, from its foundation to its inauguration in the bay of Santander, in the North of Spain. The architect, a contemporary master, Renzo Piano. The filmmaker, another contemporary master, Carlos Saura.
In the 1980s, Richard Hambleton was the Shadowman, a specter in the night who painted hundreds of startling silhouettes on the walls of lower Manhattan and, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sparked the street art movement. After drug addiction and homelessness sent him spinning out of the art…
Shelter Without Shelter is the story of the great hopes and profound challenges of sheltering forced migrants across Europe and the Middle East. Filmed over three years, this documentary feature takes you behind the scenes to the realities of refugee shelters, the people who created them, and the migrants who…
A short documentary that shows, in a one minute time laps, the daily routine of an old lady that sits all day long on a bench in front of her apartment block.
As the Internet finally arrives in tiny Bhutan, documentarian Thomas Balmès is there to witness its transformative impact on a young Buddhist monk whose initial trepidation gives way to profound engagement with the technology. The film follows Peyangki in his rural monastery as he forms, via WeChat, a virtual relationship…
Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza is a major figure in the history of contemporary architecture, with projects that have changed the urban landscape of many cities around the world. Although his name and his works are widely known, Álvaro Siza is a reserved and introspective person who prefers to stay…
A poetic and personal cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality and loss, SKIN OF GLASS follows my journey upon discovering that my late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, has become occupied by hundreds of homeless families.
A documentary series about modernist architecture, its utopian ambitions and controversial fate.The first season deals with Croatian tourist architecture – places where citizens from the East and the West could meet during the Cold War and, together with the locals, put aside their differences in moments of leisure. Surrounded by…
Today, one person in six lives in a slum, a squat, or any other precarious dwelling. Governments consider these to be problems and try to eradicate them by building public housing, but most citizens refuse to live in environments that fail to address their reality. The documentary Slums: Cities…
