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Architecture & Design

Architecture & Design

From chairs mass-produced to hand-crafted, architects and architecture, buildings made of mud to high-rises, landscapes, cities and city planning, OVID offers a wide-ranging selection of films exploring our built environments, and how to live in them.

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Architecture & Design
  • Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process

    Directed by Jacob Jørgensen & Henrik Lundø • Documentary • 2010 • 77 minutes

    From the huge golden sun of The Weather Project at the Tate Modern until last year's New York Waterfalls, Olafur Eliasson has managed to rattle audiences and art critics alike.

    Filmmakers Henrik Lundø and Jacob Jørgens...

  • Concrete Love: The Bohm Family

    Directed by Maurizius Staerkle Drux • Documentary • With Gottfried Bohm, Elisabeth Bohm, Stephan Bohm, Peter Bohm, Paul Bohm • 2016 • 88 minutes

    Pritzker Prize laureate Gottfried Böhm is widely regarded as Germany’s preeminent architect. The son of a master builder of churches, he’s also the pat...

  • The Destruction of Memory

    Directed by Tim Slade • Documentary • 2016 • 85 minutes

    The bombing of Sarajevo's National Library and the burning of its ancient books. The looting of the Iraqi National Museum and destruction of its priceless historical objects. The beheading of Kahled al-Asaad, long-time lead archaeologist fo...

  • Ô saisons ô châteaux (Agnès Varda)

    Directed by Agnès Varda • Documentary • With Danièle Delorme • 1956 • 21 minutes

    This early Agnès Varda short looks at the castles of the Loire Valley — and the unusual histories and personalities behind them. Punctuated by first-person accounts, excerpts from well-known poems, and stylish re-cr...

  • All the World's Memory

    Directed by Alain Resnais • Documentary • 1956 • 21 minutes

    This recently restored early short by French New Wave director Alain Resnais (perhaps best known for Hiroshima Mon Amour), pays homage to the National Library of France. For centuries, the library has served as a repository for all the ...

  • Great Expectations

    Directed by Jesper Wachtmeister • Documentary • 2007 • 52 minutes

    Great Expectations provides an astonishing journey through innovative, futuristic, utopian and sometimes bizarre architecture projects-including concrete illusions of grandeur and Lego-like modular apartments to an Instant City Ai...

  • Notre-Dame of Paris, Rising from the Ashes

    Directed by Laurent Fléchaire • Documentary • 2021 • 58 minutes

    Three years ago, Notre-Dame of Paris cathedral’s roof tops were destroyed by flames in front of the eyes of the whole world. Since then, we have seen the clearance and securing efforts and eventually the start of a huge reconstructi...

  • Eames: The Architect & The Painter

    Directed by Jason Cohn & Bill Jersey • Documentary • 2011 • 84 minutes

    Design history was born in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, California, where Charles and Ray Eames set up their Renaissance-style studio in the optimistic flush of American victory during World War I...

  • The New Rijksmusuem

    Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk • Documentary • With Taco Dibbits, Wim Pijbes • 2014 • 131 minutes

    In 2003, the ambitious renovation of one of the world's greatest museums began. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to glorious masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer and others, was supposed to reopen its ...

  • Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story

    Directed by Jason Cohn • Documentary • With Sebastian Roché (narrator) • 2023 • 79 minutes

    From the filmmaker of Eames: The Architect and the Painter comes a new documentary about a pioneer of modern design. Architect Eliot Noyes was one of the leading pioneers of modern design during the mid-ce...

  • Future of Mud

    Directed by Susan Vogel • Documentary • 2007 • 58 minutes

    Through the story of a mason in Djenne, Komusa Tenapo, and his family, this documentary examines an African tradition of mud architecture in Mali. The environmental genius of these ancient construction techniques thick walls with tiny win...

  • Electric Signs

    Directed by Alice Arnold • Documentary • 2012 • 58 minutes

    New screen-based sign systems are putting TV-style advertising into the public domain in cities around the globe. These electronic signs are re-shaping urban environments and re-defining areas of public space by intensifying the commerci...

  • Touristic Intents

    Directed by Mat Rappaport • Documentary • With Hasso Spode, Sussanna Misgajski, Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper • 2022 • 72 minutes

    Architecture, mass tourism and political ideology come together in Touristic Intents, a new documentary that investigates the never-completed Nazi resort of Prora on Germany'...

  • The Absent House

    Directed by Ruben Abruna • Documentary • 2013 • 55 minutes

    A designer from Puerto Rico pioneered green architecture thirty years ago, and today he confronts climate change with sustainable constructions including a house without a roof that is completely independent of the power and water utilit...

  • H2Omx

    Directed by Jose Cohen • Documentary • 2013 • 82 minutes

    Built on a basin surrounded by mountains and with little drainage, Mexico City is facing a water crisis driven by geography, population, and history. With a growing population, a depleted aquifer, and 40 percent of the water being brought ...

  • Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes

    Directed by Stephen Ives • Documentary • 2020 • 62 minutes

    BEATRIX FARRAND'S AMERICAN LANDSCAPES follows award-winning public garden designer Lynden B. Miller as she sets off to explore the remarkable life and career of America's first female landscape architect, Beatrix Farrand. Farrand was res...

  • The Oyler House: Richard Neutra's Desert Retreat

    Directed by Michael Dorsey • Documentary • With Kelly Lynch • 2012 • 46 minutes

    In 1959, a government employee named Richard Oyler, living in the tiny desert town of Lone Pine, California, asked world-famous modern architect Richard Neutra to design his modest family home. To Oyler's surprise, N...

  • One Big Home

    Directed by Thomas Bena • Documentary • 2017 • 88 minutes

    Gentrification comes in many forms. On the tiny island of Martha's Vineyard, where presidents and celebrities vacation, trophy homes threaten to destroy the island's unique character.

    Twelve years in the making, ONE BIG HOME follows one ...

  • Beijing Besieged by Waste

    Directed by Wang Jiuliang • Documentary • 2011 • 72 minutes

    Photographer Wang Jiu-liang travels to more than 500 landfills, fearlessly documenting Beijing's unholy cycle of consumption through poignant observational visits with the scavengers who live and work in the dumps.

    While China's econom...

  • Biophilic Design

    Directed by Stephen R. Kellert & Bill Finnegan • Documentary • 2012 • 62 minutes

    Come on a journey from our evolutionary past and the origins of architecture to the world's most celebrated buildings in a search for the architecture of life. Together, we will encounter buildings that connect peop...

  • Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman

    Directed by Herb Stratford • Documentary • 2021 • 68 minutes

    Gustav Stickley is one of the most recognizable names in American furniture. A visionary designer, he was the key driving force in bringing the Arts and Crafts movement to America in the early 1900s. His furniture work included what ha...

  • How to Build an Igloo

    Directed by Douglas Wilkinson • Documentary • 1949 • 10 minutes

    A demonstration of igloo-building in Canada's Far North, showing how the site is selected and how blocks of snow are used to make a snug shelter in only an hour and a half. As the camera follows each stage, the commentary explains t...

  • Gray Matters: Architect & Designer Eileen Gray

    Directed by Marco Orsini • Documentary • 2014 • 76 minutes

    The documentary Gray Matters explores the long, fascinating life of architect and designer Eileen Gray, whose uncompromising vision defined and defied the practice of modernism in decoration, design and architecture.

    Making a reputation...

  • Suspension

    Directed by Simón Uribe Martínez • Documentary • 2020 • 75 minutes

    Deep in the misty jungle of southern Colombia, between treacherously steep mountain slopes, stands an unfinished concrete bridge as an absurd symbol of human folly. Once intended as a link in the new “bypass” that was supposed to...