Image: Ian Mun

Where should architectural thinking with care begin? This chapter situates the opportunity of caring-with within the realm of architectural representation, specifically through affective filmic media. Film places architecture in the “middle ground” especially after architecture is occupied, thus allowing an audience to perceive architecture as relationally complex toward people and things. Film offers a critical and material response to the issues of care, a problematic that has limited traction and remains largely speculative in the design stage. The chapter opens by looking at the expanded role of documentary film in architecture to engage issues of subjectivity and historiography. Examining in detail filmmakers–artists Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne’s acclaimed Koolhaas Houselife (2008) and Moriyama-San (2017), I argue how architectural representation can fold in care by closely attending to modes of occupancy and domesticity, being alive to occupant habits and practices, and paying attention to non-disciplinary modalities of spatial production including housekeeping, cleaning, and maintenance work. The third and final section discusses the importance of vulnerability as a conceptual lens to reconsider architecture through domesticity, a perspective developed in the closing photo essay based on Objects for Thriving (2022), made in collaboration with Singapore-based filmmaker Ian Mun.