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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
  • 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 ...

  • Ô saisons ô châteaux

    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...

  • Unfinished Spaces

    Directed by Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray • Documentary • 2012 • 86 minutes

    Cuba's ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists, Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi, in the wake of Castro's Revolution, is neglected, nearly forgotten, then ultimately ...

  • How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

    Directed by Norberto López Amada & Carlos Carcas • Documentary • With Norman Foster, Buckminster Fuller, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Richard Rogers, Richard Serra • 2010 • 80 minutes

    Born in Manchester, England, on the wrong side of the tracks, Norman Foster rose from a humble working class bac...

  • 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...

  • Renzo Piano: The Architect of Light

    Directed by Carlos Saura • Documentary • 2018 • 110 minutes

    Carlos Saura celebrates the relationship between architecture and cinema as imagined by Renzo Piano, the Genoese architect who designed some of the most significant contemporary buildings in the world.

  • Monobloc

    Directed by Hauke Wendler • Documentary • 2022 • 90 minutes

    Universally recognized yet frequently discarded, the monobloc plastic chair has been the world’s best-selling piece of furniture since its invention in the 1970s, with over a billion units in circulation worldwide.

    Hauke Wendler’s feat...

  • 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...

  • The Next Industrial Revolution

    Directed by Chris Bedford and Shelley Morhaim • Documentary • With Susan Sarandon • 2001 • 55 minutes

    While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete for ever scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more e...

  • Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect

    Directed by Markus Heidingsfelder, Min Tesch • Documentary • With Dirk Baecker, Cecil Balmond, Rem Koolhaas • 2008 • 98 minutes

    Rarely has an architect caused as much sensation outside of the architecture community as Rem Koolhaas. His outstanding creations--such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, ...

  • 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...

  • Aboriginal Architecture

    Directed by Paul M. Rickard • Documentary • 2006 • 93 minutes

    ABORIGINAL ARCHITECTURE, LIVING ARCHITECTURE offers a fascinating in-depth look into the diversity of North American Native architecture. Featuring expert commentary and stunning imagery, this program provides a virtual tour of seven ...

  • The Best of Both Worlds

    Directed by John de Graaf • Documentary • 2020 • 27 minutes

    Originally a Danish creation, cohousing struggled to gain popularity in its country of origin for years. That is, until a film was made that explained its merits and how people found it enhanced their lives. Now a new film by award-winn...

  • Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation

    Directed by Stefan Haupt • Documentary • 2014 • 94 minutes

    One of the most iconic structures ever conceived, Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia is an astonishing architectural project first imagined by Antoni Gaudi in the late 19th century. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation celebrates Gaudi's vision ...

  • Typeface

    Directed by Justine Nagan • Documentary • With None listed on IMDB • 2009 • 63 minutes

    In rural Wisconsin, a lone employee waits in a cavernous old museum for visitors to come. A few individuals straggle in every few days and then, come Friday, the museum fills with life. Machines hum, presses p...

  • 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...

  • Lost Rivers

    Directed by Caroline Bacle • Documentary • 2012 • 72 minutes

    Nearly every major city was built near the convergence of many rivers. As cities grew with the Industrial Revolution, these rivers became conduits for disease and pollution. The 19th-century solution was to bury them underground and me...

  • City Dreamers

    Directed by Joseph Hillel • Documentary • With Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Denise Scott Brown, Arthur Erickson • 2018 • 81 minutes

    Joseph Hillel's new documentary explores how four trailblazing architects have helped transform our cities.

    Phyllis Lambert...

  • Tiny: A Story About Living Small

    Directed by Merete Mueller & Christopher Smith • Documentary • 2013 • 62 minutes

    After a decade of travel, Christopher Smith approaches his 30th birthday and decides it's time to plant some roots. He impulsively buys a 5-acre plot of land in hopes of fulfilling a lifelong dream of building a hom...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Dreaming of a Tree House

    Directed by Beate Lendt • Documentary • 2011 • 85 minutes

    DREAMING OF A TREE HOUSE is a film about the pioneering community-building project of the world-famous architect Frei Otto in Berlin, called the Okohaus-an experimental, ecological, customized housing project in the city center.

    Includi...

  • 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 ...

  • 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 ...