Something to watch over the next few weeks: Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival

I real­ised talk­ing to Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights last Friday that the reas­on I enjoy the Architecture & Design Film Festival so much is because the films are all so optimistic. 

To start with a blank piece of paper and then draw some­thing on it, and even fur­ther, build that thing and make a dif­fer­ence. In today’s gloomy world, I love see­ing stor­ies about people who dream of a bet­ter way.

The Aurora dis­trict of Turin was a down-on-its-heels work­ing class part of town, suf­fer­ing from the reduc­tion of loc­al industry. A few years ago the Lavazza cof­fee com­pany decided to build a new head office there and in the pro­cess trans­formed the entire neigh­bour­hood with access­ible, sens­it­ive and gen­er­ous design choices. Not only did they build a beau­ti­ful curved (and green) build­ing to house the offices, they con­ver­ted an old power sta­tion into a museum, cre­ated gar­dens with foun­tains and opened two staff res­taur­ants that are open to the pub­lic. One is over­seen by Michelin-starred chef Ferran Adrià and the oth­er was designed by Oscar-winning set design­er Dante Ferretti.

Nuvola, an Open Project for the City is a short doc­u­ment­ary that beau­ti­fully shows off the design choices, and also the impact on a com­munity that has been re-energised by the devel­op­ment. After a while, it becomes clear that none of this would be pos­sible if Lavazza was­n’t still a family-owned com­pany – third and fourth gen­er­a­tion Lavazzas appear near the end to talk about their favour­ite aspects of the pro­ject. I basked in this film and am now des­per­ate to vis­it Turin.

The fest­iv­al is exper­i­ment­ing away from doc­u­ment­ary with the selec­tion of nar­rat­ive fea­tures this year, still with a design or archi­tec­ture theme. The Great Arch (La grande arche) is the story of one of the most awe­some pieces of mod­ern design in the heart of Paris. In the early 80s, a com­pet­i­tion was held to put a build­ing at the far end of the Champs-Élysées, 4km from the Arc de Triomphe. Little-known Danish archi­tect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang) some­how won the con­test des­pite hav­ing pre­vi­ously built noth­ing big­ger than a church.

Out of his polit­ic­al depth among the Parisian movers and shakers, he fought to stay true to his ori­gin­al vis­ion – a cube with a hole in it – at great per­son­al cost. Surprisingly, the film does­n’t flinch from the real­it­ies of huge con­struc­tion pro­jects, mak­ing drama from the choices about marble and glass. The – pre­sum­ably – digit­al recre­ations of the pro­ject at vari­ous stages of the build are excel­lently done.

The main reas­on why there are so many doc­u­ment­ar­ies about mid-Century American archi­tec­ture is that there is so much archiv­al mater­i­al to choose from. Jake Gorst’s doc­u­ment­ary, Googie, about Californian leis­ure design – what Emile Donovan called “Jetson archi­tec­ture” – of the 50s and 60s has lots of film and pho­tosto choose from, as well as access to ori­gin­al draw­ings and mod­els. It also seems to have an end­less sup­ply of his­tor­i­ans, arch­iv­ists, pre­ser­va­tion­ists and enthu­si­asts on tap and their excite­ment and joy is infectious.

I did­n’t even know that this style of archi­tec­ture had a name – Googie came from the nick­name of the wife of the first cli­ent – and now I can see its influ­ence in so many of my favour­ite films. On the East Coast, diners were drab and rect­an­gu­lar – often old rail­way car­riages – but in California they were all weird angles with giant illu­min­ated signs that reached for the sky. An optim­ist­ic archi­tec­ture, indeed.

The num­ber one job of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens is to let ignora­muses like me know that the gar­dens actu­ally exist. Job done, then. It’s basic­ally a bro­chure for this epic devel­op­ment on the site of the former Hamilton City land­fill con­tain­ing over a dozen rect­angles – they are mostly rect­angles – inspired by gar­dens from oth­er parts of the world and oth­er eras. While I’m not sure about the schol­ar­ship involved – an Egyptologist acquaint­ance says to take the his­tor­ic­al accur­acy of the Egypt garden with a pinch of salt – there’s no deny­ing the craft and care that’s gone into them.

On Culture 101 the oth­er day, I men­tioned that I found it strange that the gar­dens sit beside the Waikato River but have very little rela­tion­ship to it but the film isn’t inter­ested in any­thing that isn’t a cel­eb­ra­tion of the facil­ity or going to sell more tickets.

Stardust: A Story of Love and Architecture is the only film where the designs them­selves did­n’t grab me. Indeed, des­pite being an enthralling story of the part­ner­ship between Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – he the intel­lec­tu­al found­a­tion and she brid­ling at not get­ting her due as the cre­at­ive force behind the build­ings them­selves – every time the film included a pic­ture of one of their con­struc­tions my response was simply, “yuck”.

You can­’t win them all, I know, but I was sur­prised at how even my untrained eye can tell that Venturi & Brown’s post-modern, geo­met­ric­ally chal­lenged build­ings were bad jokes. Not nearly as much fun as they thought they were and nowhere near as much fun as those Googie California diners.

The fest­iv­al is cur­rently screen­ing in Auckland and then travels to 12 oth­er loc­a­tions around New Zealand between now and 22 June.

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The Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival has been a staple of my cov­er­age for a few years:

In 2018, there was a film about a Dutch land­scape garden­er called Piet Oudolf that both the editor-in-chief and I remem­ber fondly.

In 2019, I learned about Bauhaus (and am all the bet­ter for it).

In 2022, I was bewitched by the story of The Automat.

In 2023, a film about the archi­tect Richard Henriquez made me want to vis­it Vancouver very badly.

In 2024, Skin of Glass was the most incred­ible doc­u­ment­ary I saw that year. 

And in 2025, I did­n’t write the fest­iv­al up but did talk about it on RNZ.