Architecture Film Festival

Tonight was the first night for me at the Architecture and Design Film Festival and I have to say by the end I was feeling kind of let down. I think this is ultimately due to my expecting too much from the field of architecture. There were two things that contributed to my coming to these conclusions.

First, we watched a really great film called The Art and Science of Renzo Piano. Unlike several of the other films of the night this film itself was very well done. However it did not live up to my expectations of including the user. Renzo Piano did an amazing job creating a green building that wouldn't surprise me if it went way past LEED standards, or was completely unable to compete on LEED level. This is in reference to his California Academy of Sciences building. He also did a fairly good job of including the clients and their ideas on how to sell the museum to its new audience. Unfortunately as I was getting more and more entrenched in his environmental design I was realizing that, in the end, he did not speak to the user themselves.

On a similar note coming back to Bjarke Ingels, I, along with the majority of the audience, was amazed by his film My Playground. This film was extremely insightful regarding a new type of extreme sport called parkour. I had never heard of this sport before a few months ago and now there are a number of people interested in it! I was also happy to hear that he is thinking of incorporating this idea of using the exterior of his building as a social space into his next building. For his next building he will be creating a power plant with a sort of ski valley down one side. This inclusion of the exterior is far beyond the ideas of many architects. Once again my expectations were only let down in that I wished for him to bring this idea of creating social spaces and including the user into the interior as well as the exterior for I felt that the user of the interior space was left out of the equation.

As a friend of mine commented to me, these individuals are, after all, designers. We as social scientists can only expect so much of them. This is where I think I differ from her for I do expect more, this is why I want to teach. So that I can help make my expectations come true!