Between dream and reality: in search of architectural utopias of yesterday
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A steel city that gets the neighbours gossiping. Lightweight Japanese-style houses, configurable by their future buyers. A construction kit entrusted to students. In the Charleroi, Liège and Brussels of the 1970s, three architects and a handful of adventurous residents wanted to make their utopia a reality through self-build homes that were affordable for everyone. How do these utopias survive the test of time? Where did the ideas of these utopians come from, and how do they resonate today? And what have these architectural experiments meant in the lives of their residents? In this film, Élodie Degavre revisits the protagonists Paul Petit, Jean Englebert and Lucien & Simone Kroll, fifty years after the realisation of their prototypes.
She explores ideas about living and cohabitation in the past and present. At a time when housing is in crisis and the built environment is being questioned more than ever, this film asks crucial questions and shows wonderful and inventive constructions.
Fifty years after the realisation of their prototypes, the three now elderly architects – Lucien & Simone Kroll, Jean Englebert and Paul Petit – take the director on a journey of discovery through these extraordinary homes. During this joyful journey through time, a crucial question arises: what about us, how will we live tomorrow?
With this documentary, Elodie Degavre revives the spirit of an era and connects it to our contemporary questions about the housing crisis. Her personal approach also leads us to deeper questions: what is the role of the architect and what can we learn from the utopias of yesterday?
Élodie introduces the film and is happy to talk to the audience afterwards.
Élodie Degavre is an architect, lecturer and film director based in Brussels. She has worked as a project manager for various architectural firms and collaborates with A+ Architecture in Belgium. She is currently working as a researcher (UCLouvain) in the field of sensitive research methods and has released a documentary about experiments with affordable housing in the 1970s: La vie en Kit (Life, assembled).
La Vie en Kit has been screened at a number of renowned festivals, including the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, the International Art Film Festival in Montreal, and the Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York and Chicago. The film won the audience award at the Brussels International Art Film Festival.