Eve Marguerite Allen discusses the way architecture and place
undergo construction and destruction at the hands of inhabitants in two
documentaries: Over Your Cities Grass
Will Grow (2010) dir. Sophie Fiennes and Village at the End of the World (2012) dir. Sarah Gavron.
Architecture and Place in Documentary Film
All places are in a continuous, gradual flux of being built
or unbuilt, both physically and ideologically.
All buildings are temporary; some are just more temporary than others,
as was asserted by the British architect Cedric Price. At times, structures are
designed to be impermanent, even moveable and nomadic like the Canadian
Newfoundland fishing communities that float their lightweight houses behind
them when moving across water to new grounds. Others are built to last
indefinitely like the Greek amphitheatres or the Pantheon but will in all
likelihood crumble at some point. And occasionally places are forced into
disuse.
Two contrasting documentaries examining places at key points
in their own process of being constructed or unconstructed are Sophie Fiennes’
Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and Sarah Gavron’s Village at the End of the
World. In the first, an artist has taken on an abandoned space occupied by
disused manufacturing works, he then builds multiple structures of his own,
making physical his own idea of an imaginary space. It is the vast creation of
one individual. When visualised on film it is often physical structure,
inhabited and uninhabited, that offers visual clues to permanency. But this
space is not intended for permanency or occupancy and instead is used to
demonstrate the industrious process of art making. In the second documentary a
tiny fishing village in Greenland may become abandoned as the population falls
below 60. It has been lived in for countless generations and the handful of
existing structures evolve to meet the necessities of the seasonal or quotidian
activities of the inhabitants.
