Goff in the Desert

One of our favourite architects, Bruce Goff gets his due in this documentary, which captures dozens of the eccentric buildings he designed from the 1930s to 1970s. Of director Heinz Emigholz's growing body of architectural surveys, this one offers some of his most compelling meditations on space. Goff's consistently unorthodox constructions are matched by Emigholz's persistently skewed camera angles, an almost sublime marriage of subject and filmmaker. Shot compositions sometimes verge on becoming fetishized abstractions but are rescued by elements of chance in the soundtrack and the unpredictable way in which the structures have been customized by their owners. The 'making of' documentary reveals a curious range of inhabitants. Emigholz's documentaries illustrate 'the fate of modernism': buildings as living, changing entities rather than the idealized purity of designs in their original state.