There's that special "eureka" moment that unlocks the personality of a character or reveals something vital about a plot in all sorts of narratives and stories.
In Kaspar Astrup Schröder's documentary "BIG TIME" about Danish star-architect Bjarke Ingels, the eureka moment arrives shortly after the beginning of the film.
Ingels invites the director to have dinner at his parents' and shows him the view on the forest and the lake opening up at the back of the classic Danish modernist house north of Copenhagen where he spent his childhood. The house has a key feature - a flat roof: as a child Ingels would climb on it and look at the view from that raised perspective.
The flat roof or the possibility of climbing a building and walking on it have become important elements in Bjarke Ingels Group's (BIG) designs including the Gammel Hellerup Gymnasium, with its soft vaulted wooden roof functioning also as a social bench, and 8 House, a housing complex in the shape of a figure of eight with a bike path looping around it.
This "eureka" moment then dissolves and the documentary becomes a journey through Ingels' buildings and life that mirrors the journey Schröder took as he followed the architect around over the course of several years (between 2010 and 2016).
Ingels is filmed as he relocates to New York where he opens a branch of his company to follow the development of high-profile projects Via 57 West, a 44-story apartment building, and the new Two World Trade Center building, one of the skyscrapers that will replace the Twin Towers, which collapsed on the 11th of September 2001 in Manhattan.
At the beginning the documentary seems more focused on architecture and on Ingels' career and creative process: every now and then the architect is filmed quickly sketching on paper and dissecting his projects and ideas, revealing the audience his main principle, that is creating unlikely combinations and coming up with something extraordinary out of the ordinary.
One of the best examples is the plan for Amager Bakke, a smoke ring-blowing garbage-fuelled power plant with a slanted roof that can double up as a ski slope in Copenhagen.
Things start to take a different turn in the documentary when Ingels is hit by health-related issues and starts contemplating more about life, realising that many architects died prematurely and never managed to see their projects finished, among them Antoni Gaudí run over by a tram on his way to church in Barcelona, Le Corbusier who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, and Louis Kahn who had a heart attack in the men's room in Manhattan's Penn Station.
Criticised maybe for his ambitious and utopian projects, his stubborness, opportunism and eclecticism, Ingels has so far tried to get his buildings done, breaking the fossilised architectural system with a new approach combining avant-garde wild ideas with working with corporate consultants.
All this came at a great cost, though, as fast rhythms have characterised Ingels' career so far: he founded his firm in 2005, published in 2009 an architecture book in a comic-book format (as a young many he dreamt of becoming a graphic novelist...) - Yes Is More - and, since then, he won numerous architectural competitions. The Wall Street Journal named him the Innovator of the Year for Architecture in 2011 and Time magazine named Ingels one of the world's 100 most influential people last year.
The director juxtaposes these achievements in the film with the slower rhythms of MRI brain scans and doctors appointments, while he also turns the story of a young architect into a documentary with a more universal final meaning.
The way Ingels moves from project to project, feels the pressures of life upon him and neglects his private life and health, becomes indeed a metaphor for our modern lives.
The narrative of the documentary becomes more fragmented and resumes a more natural rhythm when Ingels falls in love with Spanish architect Ruth Otero and they are shown walking around Via 57, that is Ingel's "courtscraper", a combination of the Scandinavian courtyard and the American skyscraper.
You could argue that there's not just architecture and ambition in the documentary, but a hunger for life, love and health, things that too often we give for granted.
Take this documentary not as the definite one about BIG, but as an introduction to the company's work: since Schröder shot the film BIG completed the LEGO house in Billund, and it is currently working on a series of commissions, including a new stadium for the Washington Redskins, Google's headquarters in Mountain View, USA, and the Tirana National Theatre in Albania, so maybe we will get a follow up in the next few years.
The documentary opened yesterday the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) at the historic Los Angeles Theatre Center (514 S. Spring Street) and will be on again this Sunday.
The Los Angeles edition of the ADFF, an event founded by architect Kyle Bergman in 2009, also features Reiner Holzemer's documentary "Dries" , Mina Chow's "Face of a Nation: What Happened to the World's Fair?" and Sarah Howitt's "Building Hope: The Maggie's Centres". The event, on until Sunday, will feature over 30 films, director Q&As and panel discussions. You can check out the full programme here.
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