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Award Information

2025 Award Recipient

“is this an architectural documentary?” an innovative introduction to work of pioneering Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva, is the winner of the 2025 Society of Architectural Historians Film and Video Award. Both scholarly and broadly accessible, the film recasts and reorients the canonical narrative of modern architecture by intertwining three stories of architecture in the global south: the pioneering practice of de Silva, the experiences of residents in her 1958 community housing scheme, and the non-linear journey of the filmmakers, who question and challenge the existing format of architectural documentaries.

Presenting the dialogue in the form of an animated graphic novel, the filmmakers self-consciously and playfully challenge the traditional interview and oeuvre format of many documentaries about architectural luminaries. This format enlivens interviews and remembrances, giving color and warmth to architectural drawings, newspaper clippings, old photos, and the words of current residents, professional colleagues, and those who knew the architect. Moving from past to present and back again, this recursive, dialogical, non-linear film eventually echoes de Silva’s innovative participatory methods.

2025 Honorable Mention

“Bruno Zevi: Architecture as a Prophecy,” is a well-researched and beautifully structured documentary, for interpreting Zevi’s monumental oeuvre through the lens of his formative anti-fascist politics. The film’s rhythm of four chapters and clever sub-divisions resonates, cinematographically, with Zevi’s analytic rigor and animated pedagogy. While known for his personal charisma and radiophonic voice, the filmmakers intertwine the intellectual and political in Zevi’s life to show how his personal experience during W.W.II, and the vulnerability he felt under authoritarian rule, turned into a catalyst for his uncompromising challenge to contemporary architectural dogma. For Zevi, the social purpose of groundbreaking architecture was to “deconstruct homogenous institutions of power [and] censorship.” The didactic format of the film thus serves as a timely reminder of the critical and imaginative potential of modern architecture because, to quote Zevi, “architectural poetry” can emerge only through “an engaged, pained, [and] disturbed modernity.”