Can Architects Save the World? (2015)

"Can Architects Save the World?" In this 52-minute documentary, a museum exhibition of architectural models inspires thoughts about whether architects, and architecture, are becoming more prominent in our lives. The exhibition showed models for projects around the world designed by BIG, the international firm founded by well-known Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Washington DC's National Building Museum displayed the models in an unprecedented way, suspending BIG's models in the air, around the second floor of the building's spectacular Great Hall, in an exhibition entitled "Hot to Cold" that ran from January-August 2015. Interviews with the exhibition's curators, and with architects, urban planners, and architecture critics, suggest that forces in society today -- forces like climate change, competition for residents between suburbs and cities, and an increasingly design-literate public -- are making architects more prominent. As a result, the design-thinking process used in architecture could become part of how society solves some of its complex problems -- problems that the political process often seems too gridlocked to solve on its own.