Best Documentaries for Architects

Watching documentaries is the most enjoyable thing to get inspired and develop your architectural vision. In the rest of the article, you can find the best documentaries we recommend for architects.

Photo Source: Shaping the light. Church of Light by Tadao Ando | The Strength of Architecture | From 1998 (metalocus.es)

City Dreamers

City Dreamers is a documentary about our evolving urban environment and 4 female architects who have spent over 70 years working, analyzing, and contemplating the alterations creating today’s and tomorrow’s cities.

Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, and Denise Scott Brown may not be well-known, but architecture and urban planning enthusiasts are probably aware that these women have collaborated with some of the greatest architects of our time. Also, including Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi who are really well-known and succesfull city planners and architects all over the world. They have left an ineraseable impact on various cities in North America and Europe over their inspirational careers according to the documentary.

The Architect of Light

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect best renowned for his high-tech public spaces, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Carlos Saura who is the film maker of this documentary, accompanies Renzo Piano as he builds one of his most renowned buildings, the Centro Botin art gallery in Santander, Spain. The building makes a powerful visual statement, from its high glass and steel pathways to the ceramic tiles that reflect the sunlight and the sea.

Tadao Ando: From Emptiness to Infinity 

The documentary is a must for all architects and designers because it provides insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of a well-known and award-winning architect like Tadao Ando, who not only teaches us the skill of precise design but also teaches us humility.

The documentary begins in a very impressive way, almost from the first moment, it takes you from emptiness to infinity. In an almost empty street in Osaka, outside of ‘Church of the Light,’ before shifting the camera to an empty hall inside the church, focusing on the cruciform perforated on the wall to allow natural light inside. The camera then turns architect Tadao Ando, he starts chatting about the design while seated on the church’s benches.

The Human Scale

The Human Scale, based on the work of Danish architect Jan Gehl, makes a compelling case for planning cities around people rather than automobiles. From New York to Chongqing, this film examines cities that demonstrate varied issues, answers, and opportunities for urban growth with each case represented by distinctive, well-composed cityscapes and addressed by local city planners and architects. Andreas M. Dalsgaard’s urban planning documentary describes pedestrians, cyclists and public space everywhere. It is one of the documentaries that we recommend architects and city planners to watch.