Documenting architecture in movies, dissolved in a storyline, has invented a new visual model to understand buildings, architecture, and surroundings. In every movie, architecture can be seen as highlighting the culture of a place or the city, representing scientific innovation through high-tech buildings in sci-fi movies. But apart from this, there are movies and documentaries filmed to connect people with different phases of architecture, to signify the path of visualizing the concepts of architects through their design and understanding the broad perspective of architecture.
About the movie-The Infinite Happiness:
The Infinite Happiness is an architectural movie plotted and designed like a diary. The film has been documented by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine and revolves around a housing building called “8 House” designed by the architect Bjarke Ingels in Copenhagen. Awarded with the title of “World Best Residential Building in 2011”. The movie reflects the contemporary design of the housing development and its context to people and space which was later considered to be a successful model of construction and the idea of filming the projects specifically the content of the whole film connects the audience to housing building and inner space visually and emotionally.
Concept of the movie:
Besides measuring the constructive insight, design style, and emphasizing the detail of the building like many architectural documentaries, this movie travelled a journey throughout the housing building and focused on the inhabitants sheltered inside the building and living different lives and following different cultures and lifestyles. The movie has drawn the emphasis on a building’s characteristics which is the result of all the effort put in by the architects and construction team, that is the function of the building and the success of a well-functioning building can be acknowledged by the user or we can say, happy users. This infinite happiness is broadly filmed in every minute section of the film with sprinkles of different cultures and different philosophies of users beneath layers of construction.
Filming the film:
This movie can be understood as a collection of architectural experiences of the past ten years experimented in an innovative housing development building, the “8 House a set of massive vertically raised buildings which fits into the definition of Corbusier’s Radiant City and can be observed by the zoning of the housing, offices, schools, shops and other amenities and required spaces on a single piece of land. The filmmakers of the movie Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine made this experiment even more practical and realistic by being self-residents in the housing building for 21 days along with the common people with regular lifestyles and no architectural background, during the filming of the movie.
Noting their own experience and collecting impressions of the community, they drafted the life stories of the people living inside the building, the movie reflects the relationship of the building with its users and allows its audience to discover a different point of viewing the building as described in above paragraphs and define the architectural ability to build healthy living and socially interactive inner space which enabled a happy and worth lifestyle of the 21st century to its users.
The happy inhabitants:
The idea of selecting common people unaware of the architectural expression of a building and space connects the audience more with the imagination behind the experiment while watching the movie. The philosophies of the inhabitants living together and sharing a social community attract the viewers, as many inhabitants in the community share their happy stories and their contribution to the social activeness of the space by talking about their days in the house and reunions with the community, one of the inhabitants shares his opinion as a concern towards the tourist who experiences this housing building as a public space. The difference in everyone’s philosophies indicated their way of understanding the space, although living in the same space with similar amnesties yet everyone developed a different perspective to visualize the building and the space.
Being into the field of the architectural diversity whenever there is an approach to explore the architecture around the world and the time through movies, documentaries, and stories we always come across the discussions and elaboration of buildings, designs, and spaces and their architectural features, although they have refined level of description and knowledge about the architect’s work and vision when this became the process of documenting the architectural philosophies and details someone came with a new experiment by not affirming the feature of a building and details but let the building users make audience visualize the living inside the space.
This new ideology emphasized the motive of constructing a building rather than figuring out the process of its construction, also the other achievement of this movie and this experiment was that not only architecture students and professionals but people from the various professional and various ages can connect themselves to the story and understand the value of architecture in building a happy, healthy and comfortable life for its users.
