After the opening fanfare and any historical revisitations aside, most buildings don’t get much press, and it can be easy to forget that the building is still alive – chugging along, doing its thing. But those peaks and troughs form the cultural impact of architecture on daily life, priming how humans perceive future architectures. Documenting that internal life, in all its mundanities and triumphs, are filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, whose architectural-introspective films peek into the lives of the very humans closest to the buildings.

 “Living Architectures” is the Paris-based pair's series of short films, interviewing and observing those humans intimately involved with a significant building – electricians, housecleaners, residents, caretakers. Their focal point, however, is always the architecture, which is helplessly anthropomorphized through its humans’ experiences. Bêka and Lemoine do not play architecture critic in these films; they’re trying to show, and not tell, how a building’s experience matches up with its cultural and critical presence. “Koolhaas Houselife”, their first film in the series, pairs OMA’s Maison Bordeaux with its housekeeper, Guadalupe Acedo, as she goes about her regimen. The audience can sit back and see whether the theory really sticks to the ceiling, or whether Acedo scrubs it off.

The duo was also named one of Metropolis Magazine’s Game Changers for 2015, for their work democratizing architecture criticism through "Living Architectures". As Bêka (who is also trained as an architect) told Metropolis, “Free speech on the topic of architecture is not the exclusive property of experts…We are exploring the impact of architecture on people’s daily existence, as well as their sense of self.”

Other films in the series focus on the blue-collar neighborhood around Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church in Rome, window-washers at Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the mishmash of people inside London’s Brutalist Barbican Estate. For their most recent project, Bêka and Lemoine tune in on the lives of residents at Bjarke Ingels Group's 8 House in Copenhagen, which was featured as part of BIG’s ongoing exhibition at the National Building Museum, “Hot to Cold”. You can listen to our interview with Bjarke Ingels at the exhibition’s opening in Archinect Sessions Episode #14.