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
  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • All the Cities of the North

    Directed by Dane Komljen • Drama • With Boban Kaludjer, Boris Isakovic • 2016 • 97 minutes

    In the darkly wooded grounds and concrete boxes of what was once a Yugoslav resort complex, two men share an enigmatic, tender life. A stranger comes to town; things change, but how, what, and why remain a...

  • Thinking Existenz - Ep 04 - Suad Amiry

    Directed by Graça Castanheira • Documentary • With Suad Amiry • 2013 • 30 minutes

    Ten personalities from diverse social and geographical backgrounds reflect on the world and its future. A portrait in multiple voices of contemporary reality, revealing the deep connections that exist between our m...

  • Futures Market

    Directed by Mercedes Alvarez • Documentary • 2011 • 110 minutes

    A film essay in tableaux, FUTURES MARKET traces the connections between memory, public space, and the real estate bubbles that led to the international financial crisis. Beginning with Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos' invention o...

  • The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street

    Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes

    209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Kochuu

    Directed by Jesper Wachtmeister • Documentary • 2003 • 53 minutes

    Kochuu is included on the same DVD as Great Expectations KOCHUU is a visually stunning film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition, and its impact on the Nordic building tradition. Winding its way ...

  • Microtopia

    Directed by Jesper Wachtmeister • Documentary • 2013 • 52 minutes

    How would you feel about carrying your home in your pocket or having clothes to live in?

    For most of us, "house" means stability, structure, and permanence. In an age of increasing population and technological advances, today's m...

  • 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...

  • The Human Scale

    Directed by Andreas M. Dalsgaard • Documentary • With Jan Gehl • 2012 • 77 minutes

    50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, by 2050 it will be 80%. Cities have become the primary human habitat. According to revolutionary Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, if we are to make c...

  • 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...

  • Waste = Food

    Directed by Rob van Hattum • Documentary • 2006 • 51 minutes

    The new theory of ecologically intelligent design, green design and building, argues that manufacturers' products, when discarded, should either be completely recyclable in the Technosphere or become biodegradable food for the Biospher...