Feb. 18, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
Often subtitled, not too eager to explain itself, and mercifully light on quartz countertops and eat-in kitchens. That’s the M.O. of Shelter, the highbrow streaming service for architecture and design-themed TV content.
Launched mid-pandemic lockdown in 2020 in time to focus the restive energy of homeowners well-acquainted with domestic contempt of familiarity, it’s the product of Australian co-founders Dustin and Camille Clare, veterans of the film and TV industry that have worked as actors and film distributors.
The service’s offerings are miles away from the bombast of HGTV-style reality TV. Think profiles of Pritzker Prize winners and assorted starchitects, social impact documentaries focused on urban planning and the built environment such as The Pruitt-Igo Myth, and art-house fare like Visual Acoustics, a documentary on the life and work of Modernist architectural photographer Julius Schulman. When home renovation and remodeling shows appear, they take a glossy-magazine approach to presenting on-trend paeans to tiny homes and sustainable building that’s deliberate, sophisticated, and detail-oriented.
“We’re aiming for quality and authenticity, depth and substance — nothing repetitive, nothing like reality TV,” says Dustin Clare.
Shelter is pitched to an audience of hardcore design buffs, as well as architects and designers themselves. As with streaming services aimed only at fans of horror movies, anime or reality TV, the emergence of niche platforms like Shelter, ad-free and available for $59.99 yearly or $5.99 a month, reflects the ongoing cultural atomization of the digital era.
Dustin describes the three-year old service as still “very much a startup” at this phase. (He declined to say how many subscribers Shelter currently has.) “We have personal contact with a lot of subscribers,” he says. “We answer all questions and make viewing recommendations. It’s a more personal, in-depth experience.”
Feedback from subscribers helps steer their original content, says Camille Clare: “We’ve got quite a tight-knit group that we hear from at least once a week — sometimes once a day.”
Much of that original programming comes from Chilean journalist Kate Kliwadenko and Spanish architect Mario Novas, a filmmaking duo who focus on Latin American architecture. Examining building outside of the North American or European luxury sphere gives Kliwadenko and Novas’ films a populist bent — architects in the region must grapple with intense deficiencies in basic living conditions, and much building happens without architects at all, as in the informal settlements that spring up on the fringes of cities.
The pair’s latest Shelter original, the series “Mexity,” looks at the architecture of Mexico City. In it, architect David Mora of the firm CAVI exemplifies the show’s embrace of tactical populist design, setting up an office under a tarp at a street market and advising residents living in informal settlements on how to improve their homes. Mora’s practice underlines the fundamental connection between functional shelter and human well-being — often forgotten when architecture acts as a luxury good — by handing out prescription cards to his clients, like a doctor.
Low barriers to entry are what attracted him to Mexico City, Novas says. “The budgets are not so big, and the rules are no so big,” he says. “People just go out and try to make it happen, grabbing a few bricks and building something.” That goes for architects and developers as well as for residents of informal settlements pushed to urban fringe. “It’s place where innovation is happening at different layers,” he says.
That approach fits Shelter’s model, says Dustin Clare: “Personally, I don’t really care what you can do with $5 million. You can do anything you want. But what can you do with $5,000? Architects and designers often wonder how they can get the public more engaged with the design process — Latin America is full of examples.”
Still, the modest materials of “Mexity” are presented sumptuously, as cameras pan across barrel-vaulted ceilings in brick, linger over of volcanic stone cobbles, and zoom in on steel rebar used as stairway railing; it’s tactile to the point of being impressionistic. Architects and developers are honest about gentrification in the city, and their role in abetting it, but the converted industrial buildings that young creatives work and live in here are still more scruffy and tactical than US audiences typically see.
Mexico City has been exporting design talent all over the globe of late, and has become something of a design destination itself. Architects Tatiana Bilbao, Frida Escobedo, and the firm Productora(featured in the series) have been steadily gaining international commissions and prestige. “There’s no other country where their architects have such an impact abroad,” says Novas.
Much of the work Novas and Kliwadenko train their cameras on is about navigating the transition from informal building made by lay people to what’s considered proper architect-sanctioned design. “Do More with Less,” on architecture in Ecuador, takes its activist approach from Chilean architect Alejandro Arevena, who posits architects as politically engaged actors with a moral responsibility to resist the capitalist development machine. One episode of their series “Architecture on the Edge” features Chile’s Museo de Arte Moderno in rural Patagonia, established by political dissidents during the country’s long period of US-backed dictatorship. The building is a series of weathered shingle-style barns connected with ad-hoc corridors, filled with webs of wood ceiling beams. The structure itself feels like a piece of folk art, and its informal composition speaks to the humility and nobility of its purpose.
When Shelter does survey residential projects, the focus is on access to nature, cultural or geographic context, and tasteful proportions rather than opulence or idealized cottagecore vibes. A minimalist micro-home in the woods with custom-design cabinetry and furniture rather than a lot-gobbling McMansion is its prototypical muse. “Tiny Spaces Iceland” showcases austere modernist cabins on beaches, mountains, and fields of volcanic rock. The settings are breathtaking, but clumsy details and awkward formal compositions sometimes seems to extend the DIY spirit into high-end residential work, where it doesn’t quite fit. One episode, about a concrete water tower converted into a small house for a young family, shows off a home that stops short of a dramatic cantilever, and disguises too much of the original concrete with layers of wood and rusted Corten steel. Inside, a plywood ceiling blurs the spell of the textured concrete as well. A wider geographic focus (Australians are currently the largest audience segment) and bigger budgets to reach further across the globe would likely fix this.
Still, no one would ever confuse this with basic-cable home renovation programming; most Shelter originals aren’t personality centered; they generally let the architecture speak for itself, with a low-key cast of developers, architects and clients playing supporting roles. “We don’t enjoy repetitive reality-style home shows,” says Dustin Clare. “We watch them and feel like we are being treated like dummies.”
One exception to the formula is “Follies,” in which affable architectural historian and artist Rory Fraser explores the English tradition of one-off buildings that distill their rich clients’ incredibly bizarre fantasies and obsessions. Shelter also carries several seasons of Irish reality TV home renovation show “Room to Improve,” but instead of being hosted by photogenic twins with impeccably styled tool belts, it’s architect Dermot Bannon, whose demeanor often edges toward exasperation without ever quite getting there.
There’s a deeper focus on craft and process, which is often torturous. We watch Bannon cart his handmade models to meetings with difficult clients and endure their harangues. The architect is earnest, concise, and accommodating … up to a point. A client’s desire to connect old and new wings of their house without sufficient formal and material distinction is “going to look like an abomination,” he declares. After a job is revealed to be infected with black mold and construction stretches on for months, Bannon asks a young family whose small child has been sleeping under the rotting eaves, “Do you hate the house now?”
But once they’re done, the houses on “Room to Improve”— often small, centuries-old cottages in the Irish countryside — don’t have the plasticky sheen of American makeovers. It’s home renovation TV where the cost of moderately more light in the family room includes snapping at someone you’re also paying a lot of money to, on camera. The show’s careful delineation of space and step-by-step troubleshooting make the journey worth it — and make it clear that an architect’s home improvement show is the only one that would fit on Shelter.