Living Structures-The Architecture for Life – An Official Melbourne Documentary Film Selection
Screening on the 24th July, at 13:30, Shorts Session 4, at Cinema Nova. (https://www.mdff.org.au/films/living-structures-the-architecture-for-life)
A documentary that will challenge your current worldview on design, architecture, and our human-nature relationship. In this film Dr Phillip B. Roös, Associate Professor in Architecture and Director of the Live+Smart Research Lab, ask the critical question: “How can our global society change from its self-centric economic driven worldview to one that create built environments that put nature first?”
While the recent COVID-19 pandemic prompted a need for healthier places, this question remains unanswered. Dr Roös proposes that the answer lies in the living structures of nature, presenting a novel approach to explore nature’s design of absolute interconnectivity and wholeness. Similar to the tone of the award-winning ‘My Octopus Teacher’, the doco presents visible and non-visible living structure found in nature, including patterns of adaptive processes. The narrative of the documentary demonstrates that if we learn to live with nature, we can improve planetary wellbeing significantly. To create healthy environments, architecture critically needs to include living structure. Dr Roös reference Christopher Alexander’s 15 Fundamental Properties of Wholeness and the ‘The Nature of Order’ (2001-2005), and argue that we need a living architecture that goes beyond the current, destructive modernist movement.
Dr Roös dedicated the film to the father of Pattern Languages, Professor and Architect Christopher Alexander.
The film includes contributions by Prof Mark DeKay, Prof Timothy Beatley, Prof Nikos Salingaros, and Dr Mary-Jane Walker.
Created and written by Dr Phillip B. Roös, Directed by Caleb Plumridge, Produced by Nicole Freeman, Assistant Director James Duggan, Cinematographer Aidan Mair, Co-Editor Ben Raimondo. A film by the True South Film Company and the Live+Smart Research Laboratory, Deakin University.