Presenting Shelter at the Architecture and the City Festival

Shelter | Written by Lee Schneider

It’s always an amazing experience to screen a film for a live audience. I find that I learn so much from how they react to scenes and moments: a ripple of laughter here, contemplative silence there, or a simple ‘huh,’ signifying a small revelation.  We screened two work-in-progress sequences from Shelter at the San Francisco Public Library this week as part of the Architecture and the City Festival. The screening provided me with a lot good feedback and a lot to think about and we continue the shape the film.

It’s equally amazing to me to watch a film come into focus as we work in production. Many months are spent preparing: pre-interviewing potential subjects, test-filming them on flip cams, mapping out schedules and strategies. Then there is a sparking moment when I  meet those people in person and feel the gravity of their stories.  Here are the sequences that we showed in San Francisco.

 While filming in Haiti in August I saw that designing for good means that you have to design for a culture.

You have to have a dialogue with the people you want to design for, and understand how they have built in the past.  This might seem obvious, but it is equally obvious that, humanitarian design fails when it is imposed on a community instead of being created in a partnership.  It’s the kind of partnership that we are going to forge with our outreach program. The leading edge of that program is something we’re calling the virtual exchange.  While in Haiti I filmed Haitian architecture students, asking them about their hopes and dreams for the future, how they believe would be the best way to rebuild (and build in) Haiti, and what message they might want to send to architecture students in America.   We will show that footage at the College of Design: University of Minnesota in the fall – and then record statements and ideas from students there.  We’ll take those statements back to Haiti on our next production trip.  That’s the essence of the virtual exchange program.  I’ve spoken with the deans of architecture and design at various schools, including Pratt, Parsons, and the New School for Design, and some schools here in California, and received enthusiastic support and great advice. I’ll let you now how the planning is going in future articles.

Next week we start our planning sessions for production in Japan.  We’ve been invited by Architecture for Humanity fellow Nathaniel Corum to following a design/rebuild initiative near Sendai, site of the nuclear accident, and also in communities devastated by a  tsunami.  It promises to be a very different trip from the Haiti production section: instead of Haiti’s August heat we’ll have Japan’s November cold, and since there are few structures left standing, we’ll be camping and charging the cameras off solar arrays.

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