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From conceptual work to photographs and videos to drawings and more, the jury is reviewing entries to Architizer’s 2025 Vision Awards. Keep tabs on the world’s best architectural representation by clicking here.

A year ago, I made a third visit to the Scottish Parliament. This time, it was to see the process behind the building. In the lobby, there was a meticulously crafted exhibition filled with drawings and models by Enric Miralles. The work was breathtaking, immediately capturing my attention, even more so than the building itself. The material offered access to something the surrounding architecture could not fully reveal: the choices and possibilities behind its realization. When leaving the building, I pondered over a very specific question: why can the evidence of making hold our attention so strongly, even when the finished work is right there?

Traditionally, architecture already values process. Thinking back to architecture school, the work was never judged based on the finished product. Rather, each student was evaluated primarily on their capacity to show the process, the logic and the choices behind the design. In addition, there have been countless exhibitions and archives throughout the centuries that store and display architectural drawings and models — often viewed as a separate cultural and intellectual property from the materialized space.

In contrast, the architectural industry is exceptional in presenting the finished work through polished imagery that strips away any trace of production. There is no apparent struggle, no messiness and the building seems inevitable. Ironically, the “effortlessness” that architects aspire to communicate becomes the very thing that makes it harder to understand why they are needed in the first place.

Especially nowadays, when moving images shape so much of how we encounter the world (videos, reels, YouTube shorts), film offers architects an opportunity to make the hidden expertise even more visible. The catch, however, is to let the camera linger on how architecture happens and not use film as a medium that presents yet another ideal design realization. Using, for instance, duration and sequence, a film documents how an action meets resistance or how a test produces a discovery.

To promote and support this, the 2025 Vision Awards introduced a Making Of Video category. In Lemay’s Sketching Stories, Marie Parent explains the Montreal Irish Monument Park through drawings that unfold alongside her account of the site’s history. The arrangement of former temporary barracks informs the project’s layout, the gathering steps turn toward Ireland, and a commemorative wall incorporates Celtic crosses. As Marie Parent draws and explains, geometry acquires purpose, enabling viewers to follow the connections between research and spatial decisions and crafting a story that a finished render would never be able to communicate.

On the other hand, House of Shinsegae Heritage, by Shinsegae Art&Space Team, brings the camera closer to material production. Hands work thread and shape material across a worktable, giving attention to the people and the operations behind the objects. The majority of the sequence is filmed very closely, focusing on gestures, tools and materials, eventually zooming out to present the finished interior. By the time the film reaches the display space, its contents carry associations with bodies and accumulated skill, where making becomes part of what we see in the finished setting. Both films suggest that communicating architectural value involves giving the audience access to relationships that completion can obscure. For example, a line connects to a history, and an object connects to the knowledge of its maker.

Process films can also reveal how much architectural expertise goes into making complexity disappear. In Madison Taylor’s The Making of Home, architectural designer Greg Kirkpatrick walks through an unfinished house, explaining how concealed blind boxes were incorporated into the roof trusses and space reserved above the basement ceiling for services. In parallel, Buttcon’s film of the Spirit Garden at Nathan Phillips Square showcases a nighttime installation, where a crane lifts a canoe-shaped artwork while workers guide it into position. Suspended above the site, the object acquires a weight, scale and dependence on collective effort that its eventual placement could easily conceal.

These sequences go beyond the typical construction footage. They reveal the effort and the thinking behind each action instead of presenting a construction time-lapse that can make a building appear to assemble itself. Yet, this exposes a strange paradox in architectural communication: the more successfully the film resolves complexity, the less evidence of that achievement remains.

The challenge is ultimately editorial and asks architects to expand what their audience will witness. For a profession so concerned with communicating its value, this requires a small surrender of control. Making expertise visible also makes it available to question. But that may be precisely how architecture earns a more meaningful place in public life – by giving people enough understanding to do more than look.

From conceptual work to photographs and videos to drawings and more, the jury is reviewing entries to Architizer’s 2025 Vision Awards. Keep tabs on the world’s best architectural representation by clicking here.

Featured Image: Nathan Phillips Square IRSS Legacy Project – Spirit Garden by Buttcon, 2025 Vision Awards, Video – Making Of

The post Don’t Show Me the Finished Building: Why Architecture Needs the Making-Of Video appeared first on Journal.

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