2017 Film Challenge Finalists

Title: Rio Grande

Category: Affordable Housing

Description: Since 2017, the Texas Society of Architects has been producing short documentary films about the contributions of architecture to culture and society. In collaboration with Austin-based film production studio Lost Pines, we have made movies about the Dallas Parks Pavilion Program, which introduces high-level design in neighborhood parks throughout that city, and about the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program, which is in need of additional funding to complete its task of preserving the state’s more than 250 county courthouses. When we saw that the AIA I Look Up Film Challenge was focusing on a theme of socially engaged architecture, we thought immediately of submitting a film about the low-income and social housing that bcWORKSHOP is doing throughout Texas. Our specific interest was the work that the not-for-profit practice is doing in the Rio Grande Valley on the border with Mexico — one of the fastest growing regions in the United States and economically its most impoverished. What we found was a group of idealistic and dedicated architects collaborating with local community groups and the delightfully good-humored people of the Rio Grande Valley to provide affordable, resilient, dignified housing — truly a "blueprint for better" — in the midst of a flood-prone region beset with the rising tensions of an international frontier that is increasingly being militarized.