Behind the facade: the films of Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

Most films about architecture look something like this: we begin with an aerial view – a God-like perspective showing a building as conceived, but never experienced. Cut to a talking head of the architect for the official explanation of the big idea. Once inside we might rise weightlessly through an atrium, or follow the smooth glide of a gimbal-mounted camera through suites of tidy rooms like a fly-through of a digital model. 

Such flattery is anathema to Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine. In more than 30 offbeat documentaries the couple has turned an almost anthropological gaze on life within celebrated buildings, and more recently on their creators, with a characteristic blend of humour, polite nosiness and critical acuity.

‘We want to show the truth of a moment in a place, and not to make it artificial by either treatment or technique,’ explains Lemoine – an art historian by background – speaking via Zoom from their Venice studio. ‘We don’t even use a tripod; we are not aiming for virtuosity, but empathy for people and full immersion in everything happening around us.’ 

Their richly digressive films are concerned more with feeling and the physical experience of space than information about plans or structure. ‘You can find all you want on the Internet,’ says Bêka, who trained as an architect. They poke around behind the scenes, and delight in clashes between the order of design and the forces of disruption: dirt, defects and inhabitants who don’t recognise the implied rules. Cameo roles go to unruly children, street vendors and interloping animals, from bugs to buffalo.

In the duo’s early work, that was consciously provocative. ‘It was a polemical reaction to that period of star-making in architecture,’ says Bêka, ‘and the use of icons and imagery as a promotional tool’. Their 2008 debut, Koolhaas Houselife, follows housekeeper Guadalupe Acedo on her endless rounds of the OMA-designed Maison à Bordeaux. To a bouncy soundtrack we watch her battle leaks and wrestle a Hoover up a narrow spiral stair, offering a witty addendum to ‘elite’ accounts in the architectural press. Amid general acclaim there was furious objection. ‘People asked “how can you allow a housekeeper to talk about architecture?”,’ Bêka recalls with satisfaction. ‘It was like we were destroying a myth.’

Undeterred, the pair pushed on with a series of similarly irreverent self-financed films on buildings by boldface names. Gehry’s Vertigo, for example, spotlights abseiling maintenance workers at the Bilbao Guggenheim as they struggle, broom in hand, across the billowing curves of the interior. Without simplistic judgement, it illuminates the tensions between artistic ambition and quotidian reality. 

Although such scrutiny can be uncomfortable, the pair now has a cultural cachet comparable to some of their subjects. Last year’s Royal Academy show on Herzog & de Meuron had as its centrepiece Bêka & Lemoine’s sideways look at life in a paraplegic rehab clinic. Their latest film, an enjoyably haphazard account of a day with Studio Mumbai founder Bijoy Jain, accompanies a major exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Museum partnerships have offered new cinematic possibilities. The most ambitious is Homo Urbanus, a 10-part series totalling nine hours capturing the flavour of street life around the world. Shot close up with wide-angle lenses and projected on large screens when installed, they present the citizens and streetscapes of Doha and Bogata at life size, and allow simultaneous comparison. ‘You can almost project yourself into the cities,’ says Lemoine, ‘and experience the contrasts between them.’

While those impressionistic surveys have little narrative structure and no central characters, another series has seen a fruitful shift into portraiture, initially in the 2017 release Moriyama-San. It is a beguiling, dreamlike depiction of a reclusive bibliophile and his Ryue Nishizawa-designed Tokyo house comprising 10 distinct structures. We see an urban microcosm perfectly attuned to his eccentric habits, inviting viewers to wonder how their own desires are served or conditioned by architecture. ‘That was an important moment when we understood that our work was changing,’ says Bêka, ‘and we started looking for subjects who could help people develop their own sensibility towards space.’ 

Three follow-up documentaries have focussed on architects who lead day-long tours of their home cities. It would be interesting, the couple thought, to see how ‘experts in space’ relate to the places they live in. With Pritzker Prize-winner Nishizawa they document a rainy dash through Tokyo in a cramped Alfa Romeo, stopping at sites of personal significance including family shrines. Thai architect Boonserm Premthada revisits the Bangkok slum where he grew up, getting excited as he recalls a childhood of boxing and gambling. Arriving at Bijoy Jain’s home for their first encounter, the duo invite themselves into his morning yoga session and within minutes are chatting away like old friends.

Much in the same way that Bêka & Lemoine’s early work got beneath the surface appearance of buildings, in these intimate encounters we see the mask of professionalism drop to reveal warmth, wisdom, shyness and self-doubt. How do they do it? An improvisational approach to shooting helps, they suggest, as do three-way conversations – less oppositional than conventional interviews – and their willingness to put their own errors and human ‘fragility’ on screen. 

‘It’s not easy’, says Lemoine, ‘and we’ve met architects again in more public settings, when the magic of the moment is over, and it’s back to the mediated staging of themselves’. More’s the pity, because as Bêka & Lemoine’s curious and sensitive films beautifully demonstrate, there’s much more to architects and to architecture than a carefully composed facade.