Canadian Centre for Architecture

What are the consequences for the city now that more and more people are choosing to live alone? How should we plan our cities and what is the importance of public meeting places? More than Houses: a depressing or liberating vision?

What does it mean to live in the city without a place you can call your own? What role can architects have in addressing homelessness? And how can cities become better homes for all? The documentary film What It Takes to Make a Home follows a conversation between architects Michael Maltzan (Los Angeles) and Alexander Hagner (Vienna), who have been grappling with these questions over many years and through various projects. While the cities and the political and economic contexts in which Maltzan and Hagner work differ, both search for long-term strategies for housing instead of reacting with ad hoc solutions. Focussing on some causes and conditions of homelessness, the film questions the role architects can play toward overcoming the stigmatization of people experiencing it, in order to build more inclusive cities.

This film, produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, explores the controversial story of the planning and politics of a series of overpasses on the parkways of Long Island, commissioned in the 1920s and 1930s by the influential American public administrator Robert Moses. The story suggests that these bridges were designed to prevent the passage of buses, thereby only allowing people who could afford to own a car to access Long Island’s leisure spaces. The film investigates the story and the ongoing academic debate that it spurred through interviews with four scholars who in the 1980s and 1990s discussed interpretations of the design. The questions that the film raises engage with issues of secrecy and control, the morals of power and the effects of technology.