Exploring Architecture’s Response to Societal Changes

During this program, the audience will be able to watch the complete three-part documentary series produced by the CCA. The series includes the films What It Takes to Make a Home (2019, 29 min), When We Live Alone (2020, 27 min), and Where We Grow Older (2023, 30 min). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Giovanna Borasi, director and chief curator of the CCA, moderated by Iker Gil.

ABOUT THE FILMS

What does it mean to live in the city without a place you can call your own? What role can architects have in addressing homelessness? And how can cities become better homes for all? The documentary film What It Takes to Make a Home follows a conversation between architects Michael Maltzan (Los Angeles) and Alexander Hagner (Vienna), who have been grappling with these questions over many years and through various projects. While the cities and the political and economic contexts in which Maltzan and Hagner work differ, both search for long-term strategies for housing instead of reacting with ad hoc solutions. Focussing on some causes and conditions of homelessness, the film questions the role architects can play toward overcoming the stigmatization of people experiencing it, in order to build more inclusive cities.

When We Live Alone explores the ways in which we live alone together in contemporary cities. The unprecedented rise of urban dwellers living on their own challenges normative ideas about home and raises questions about how this change in social structure and lifestyle affects cities as a whole. While the causes of living alone seem apparent—shifting social values, the flexibilization of labour, new demographics, increased wealth, and changes to normative gender roles—the effects on society and its spatial configurations remain uncertain. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the film interrogates this new urban condition, offering glimpses into the lives of individuals inhabiting singleton homes and the extended domestic sphere. Urban dwellers living on their own, architect Takahashi Ippei, and sociologist Yoshikazu Nango navigate the audience through a series of sole spaces in Tokyo. If living alone is our new reality, the film asks what does it look like?

Where will you live once you grow older? Will your city take care of you? How to design for the elderly, and for those who care for them? The documentary Where We Grow Older  looks at how the growing aging population is reshaping architectural and social constructs and questions the role of urban design and politics in facing these challenges. The film investigates two models of how care and housing can be reconceived in light of prolonged lives: public housing as part of municipal policies and infrastructure—where the city is the caretaker—and the creation of a new architectural model that offers care in a single building managed by private entities not only to the elderly but also to their caretakers—where the building becomes the city.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The three-part documentary series is conceived by CCA director Giovanna Borasi, directed by Daniel Schwartz, and produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. It examines the ways in which changing societies, new economic pressures, and increasing population density are affecting the homes of various communities. Through the lens of architectural projects in different socio-political contexts, each episode looks at the global scope as well as the local specificities of a particular issue. While the first episode examines how architects are confronting the pressing issue of homelessness in Los Angeles and Vienna, the second and third parts of this series deal with other challenges to urban society created by changes in lifestyles and demographics that affect the spatial configuration of our environments: the increase of families consisting of one single person, and our growing aging society.

Thanks to the Canadian Centre for Architecture for partnering with us on this program. This program has been supported in part by MCHAP.