FIELD NOTES
My Architect, Urbanized and Koolhaas Houselife follow architecture past the finished building, to the people who have to live with it.
A FILM CREW AGAINST A LOW SKY. PHOTOGRAPH VIA PEXELS.
Most architecture reaches us as a photograph, finished and empty, taken at the hour when the light was best. The building in the picture has no one inside it yet. Nobody has left a coat on a chair yet, or argued about the thermostat.
The three documentaries gathered here were made between 2003 and 2011, by filmmakers who had very different questions in mind. Each one starts with architecture and ends up somewhere more interesting, with the people who have to live inside what architects make.
I. MY ARCHITECT, 2003
Louis Kahn died in 1974 in a men’s room at Penn Station, in New York. His son Nathaniel was eleven, and had known him mostly as a father who came and went at night, divided between three families and a practice that consumed everything else. Decades later, Nathaniel Kahn picked up a camera and went looking for him in the only place he could still be found, which was the buildings.
The film is generous with its interviews and unhurried with its architecture, but it saves its real answer for the end, far from Philadelphia. The National Assembly of Bangladesh, in Dhaka, was completed in 1982, eight years after Kahn’s death. There the Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who worked alongside Kahn, speaks about the building with an emotion the son has met nowhere else on his search. It becomes clear that a country received more of Louis Kahn than his own son did, and My Architect has the honesty to end on that.
II. URBANIZED, 2011
THE CITY, SEEN FROM INSIDE ONE OF ITS BUILDINGS. PHOTOGRAPH VIA PEXELS.
Gary Hustwit made Urbanized as the last part of a design trilogy that began with Helvetica and continued with Objectified. Having filmed a typeface and then the objects of industrial design, he turned to the largest thing people design together.
The film moves quickly across dozens of cities, and its best passages are about decisions rather than buildings. In Bogotá, the former mayor Enrique Peñalosa explains the bus system he built to give the city the reach of a subway at a fraction of the cost. In Santiago, Alejandro Aravena walks through a housing project by his firm Elemental, where families chose, before moving in, which parts of the house would arrive finished and which they would build themselves when they could afford to.
Neither scene offers much to photograph. That is Hustwit’s argument, made without ever stating it: the design that shapes a daily routine most is often the least visible, a lane painted on asphalt, or a wall left unbuilt on purpose.
III. KOOLHAAS HOUSELIFE, 2008
Rem Koolhaas completed the Maison à Bordeaux in 1998 for a man left in a wheelchair after a car accident. At its heart is a room that rises and falls between floors on a hydraulic platform, so that the house rearranges itself around the person who cannot climb its stairs.
Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine filmed none of that from the architect’s side. Their camera follows Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, through her working days. She vacuums around the jars in a kitchen cabinet. She mops up the rain that trickles in through the roof of a masterpiece, shaking her head at it. In an interview released alongside the film, Koolhaas recognizes exactly what the camera has caught. His idea of architecture has run into her idea of cleaning, and both have an equal claim on the same rooms.
Koolhaas Houselife is the funniest of the three films and the least reverent. It was also the first in a series the filmmakers called Living Architectures, which is as close as any of these documentaries comes to a thesis.
If there is an order in which to watch them, begin with Guadalupe. After an hour in Bordeaux, it becomes difficult to look at any photograph of a finished house without wondering who keeps the glass clean.
Sources: Architect magazine; Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; The Daily Star (Dhaka); PopMatters; Icon; Northwest Film Forum; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial; Dazed.
— The Home&Decor Editors