Now streaming: final film in CCA documentary trilogy
How can architects understand the question of home for people without housing? As more of us are living alone, how does this fact reconfigure the relationship between a private home and the shared space of the city? What changes about home as more of us grow older at the same time?
These are some of the questions emerging from our documentary trilogy that explores how changing societies, new economic pressures, and increasing population density reshape our ideas of home. Through the lens of architectural projects, each episode looks at the global scope as well as the local specificities of challenges to urban society and its spatial configuration, informed by changes in lifestyles and demographics.
While the first film, What It Takes to Make a Home (29 minutes), addresses homelessness, and the second, When We Live Alone (27 minutes), examines how people live alone, the third film, Where We Grow Older (30 minutes)—now released and streaming online—considers how an ageing population is reshaping architectural and social constructs, and asks how urban design and politics can respond to these shifts. 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 for the elderly but also for their caretakers—where the building becomes the city.
Where We Grow Older takes us to the Ali Bei housing project by Paul Vidal, Arquitectura Produccions, and Vivas Arquitectos, in the centre of Barcelona, conceived as part of the city’s social housing program and positioning the elderly as active community members; and to Carehaus, by Rafi Segal Architecture and Urbanism with collaborating artist Marisa Morán Jahn, and developer Ernst Valery, the first intergenerational care-based co-housing project in the United States, which uses space as a catalyst for the development of care-based communities by bringing together caretakers and caregivers. While the cities and the political and economic contexts differ, the two projects present the same desire to address demographic aging in a spatial and unsegregated way.
The three films in the trilogy—conceived by Giovanna Borasi, CCA Director and Chief Curator, directed by Daniel Schwartz, and produced by the CCA—deal with demographic shifts, but they are bound together by something deeper: different forms of loneliness. The unhoused, those living alone, and older adults are at high risk of physical, social, and psychological isolation, and the projects in these films acknowledge architecture’s role in shaping that reality, sometimes complicit in it, sometimes capable of doing the opposite, offering ways to belong and stay meaningfully connected to the world through space. Following screenings at film festivals and institutions worldwide, the complete trilogy is now streaming on CCAchannel.
On the occasion of the release, we hosted a conversation bringing together speakers with backgrounds in anthropology, activism, architecture, urban planning, real estate development, and municipal policy to reflect on the future of housing in Quebec: Which forms, policies, and models can allow everyone to age in place—or together? With the participation of Maryse Barrette, Isabelle Comiré, Olivier Fillion, Sébastien Lord, and Julien Simard, moderated by Marc-André Carignan, it is released online now.
The documentary trilogy is nested within Catching Up With Life, an exploration of architecture’s ability (or lack of) to evolve in dialogue with society, that has manifested in a web issue, A Social Reset, a publication and exhibition A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention, a lecture series An Extended Family; a collaboration with e-flux architecture on new spatialities of labour and inequalities, titled Workplace; among others.
Find out more about how we think and shape films as curatorial tools in our latest publication The Museum Is Not Enough 10–14, co-published with Lenz.
For more about our curatorial, publications, research, exhibition and public programs, and more opportunities, visit our website. To keep in touch, subscribe here.
