WE START WITH THE
THINGS WE FIND
SYNOPSIS
If we pay enough attention to the ordinary, we see the extraordinary. The shipping container is an accidental icon of our modern age: the eight-foot-by-forty-foot corrugated steel box that brings the world to our doorstep. It brings all our hearts’ desires’, available for purchase. And it brings us complicity in the global supply chains, and all the economic, ecological, technological, and political systems that forge those chains, as those great container ships link maker and user, buyer and seller, China and America together across the vast distances of the lawless sea. The design studio LOT-EK is a visionary practice at the intersection of art and architecture, that specializes in upcycling, which is the art and science of repurposing, remaking, rethinking, reimagining. Of using old things in new ways. The shipping container is the thing that has captured their imagination for over a quarter-century: they have remade containers into homes, schools, galleries, libraries, and more. With hundreds of millions of obsolete and unused containers around the world, this is a new and necessary architecture of the future, that repairs and regenerates the unnatural environment that we have inherited from the past. WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND is a feature-length documentary of this vision, and of the soulful lifelong partnership of the people, designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, behind it.
WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND shows us a way to be radically optimistic, creative, and constructive during times that can feel the opposite of all that. Director Thomas Piper’s acclaimed documentary feature Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf showed how the wild and unfavored plants could encourage audiences to live more responsibly with nature, and now he looks at living more smartly and sweetly with the effects of industry, infrastructure, and technology. Taking us from spark-filled workshops to a container ship sea voyage over a shimmering sea; and explaining all the prosaic and poetic design thinking behind how LOT-EK brings the container to life, the film shows how all we have can become all we need, how resourceful subsistence can feel like beautiful abundance, and how to keep going when we now know there is no such thing as a fresh start. The film is a humanist essay not only about a new kind of design thinking, but about a new design for life.
UPCOMING SCREENINGS
PRODUCING TEAM
THOMAS PIPER, DIRECTOR
Thomas Piper is an award-winning filmmaker specialized in documenting contemporary artists and designers. His most recent film, Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, won the 2018 Polly Krakora Award for Artistry in Film from the DC Environmental Film Festival, and is still in global theatrical release. His film, Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments, won Best Film for Television at the prestigious International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) in Montreal.
In addition, he has directed, photographed and/or edited more than 25 other films on painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, and writers. Subjects have included the artists Kiki Smith, Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi, the writer James Salter and poet Billy Collins, the art historian Vincent Scully, the architects Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, Jean Nouvel and Thom Mayne, and the only architects to win MacArthur “genius” grants, Jeanne Gang and Diller + Scofidio.
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A full-length documentary on Piet Oudolf by Thomas Piper.
2016 ‧ Documentary
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In this 54-minute documentary, intelligent commentary from the architects is complemented by remarkable cinematography and interviews with New York City planning commissioner Amanda Burden and other civic figures.
2012 ‧ Documentary
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This film takes as its focus the retrospective of LeWitt’s wall drawings at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, which opened for a 25 year run in November 2008.
2010 ‧ Documentary
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Cameras record artist Ellsworth Kelly as he creates sculptures for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
2007 ‧ Documentary
LOT-EK
Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano have Masters Degrees in Architecture and Urban Design from the Universita’ di Napoli, Italy (1989). After graduating they completed post-graduate studies at Columbia University, New York (1990-1991) as Visiting Scholars. They founded LOT-EK in Naples, Italy in 1993 and opened up LOT-EK’s New York studio in 1995. Besides heading their professional practice, they also teach at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Planning in Cambridge, MA.
LOT-EK is an award-winning architectural design studio renowned in the architecture/design/art world for its sustainable and innovative approach to construction, materials and space through the upcycling of existing industrial objects and systems. Their work has been exhibited in major museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim and the MAXXI.
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The house is located in a typical corner lot in Brooklyn, measuring 25×100-feet. Transforming the containers’ assembly into a single-family residence, the diagonal cut generates a very enclosed and private monolith from the surrounding streets. As striking profile that invokes Williamsburg’s industrial past, while providing a sculptural nod to the rapidly changing neighborhood.
Single family home in Brooklyn, NY
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LOT-EK was commissioned by Propertuity to design a live-work building with ground floor retail in the Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg. As a leader in urban regeneration, over the past few years Propertuity has single handedly transformed the heart of the Maboneng precinct into a vital hub of leisure, cultural and commercial life.
Largest structure made out of shipping containers
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LOT-EK was commissioned by the developer of the park to design all the public facilities within the park: a 5,000SF Entrance Pavilion followed immediately by 35,000SF Market Street; a 15,000SF Restaurant Plaza on one of the park’s hills overlooking the river; a 5,000SF Aquatic Sports Pier in one of the park’s lakes.
Extreme sports and adventure park in China
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UPCYCLE: The container architecture of LOT-EK.
Shipping Containers shot in Napoli Port, Italy
SHERRI WOLF, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Sherri Wolf is a long-time educator and currently an English teacher and English Department Head at the Brearley School, where she teaches an elective in South African Literature. She received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and her BA in English from Yale College. Fascinated by narrative and narrative structure, she has taught film at Hunter College and serves on the Board of the Educational Video Center, which empowers youth by teaching them to tell their own stories through documentary filmmaking. Since the day she met Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, the founding partners of LOT-EK, in 1997, she has been inspired by their work and creative vision.
ADVISORS
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Jorge Fontanez advises small businesses and startups with a focus on brand and marketing strategy; intensely focused on go-to-market strategy, audience development, stakeholder engagement and creating earned revenue models.
Jorge is an adjunct professor of Marketing with Bard MBA in Sustainability, where he explores how to “Achieve a Regenerative Economy through Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement.” Jorge is also a First Movers Fellow since 2014 at The Business & Society Program of The Aspen Institute, expressing a commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), creating shared value at the intersection of corporate profitability while addressing environmental and social issues.
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Thomas De Monchaux is an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia, who conducted interviews in LOT-EK’s new monograph, LOT-EK: OBJECTS + OPERATIONS.
Thomas is the inaugural winner of the Winterhouse Award for Design Writing and Criticism.
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Marques McClary is the Senior Director, Marketing, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where he leads strategic and paid marketing efforts to maximize the museum's exposure locally, nationally, and internationally. A versatile, forward-thinking project management professional, Marques has over 20 years of progressive experience across a wide range of strategic functions, specifically in the areas of arts, culture and education.
Marques was previously Director, Client Relations for the U.S. office of Lord Cultural Resources, and was responsible for managing the successful fulfillment of client projects across multiple service areas. Client projects included the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Poetry Foundation and the Clara Luper Museum and Civil Rights Center. Prior to Lord, he was Director of Communications at the American Academy in Rome, administrators of the Rome Prize fellowship that supported artists and scholars living and working together in Rome.
Marques began his career working in healthcare advertising and marketing, leading account/strategy oversight for a variety of global clients such as Gilead Sciences, Novartis, Pfizer, and others. Marques currently serves on the board of directors for Aubin Pictures and Visual AIDS, both in New York City.
SUPPORT OUR WORK
We have partnered with Aubin Pictures, a 501(c)3 organization, which acts as a fiscal sponsor to our project. All proceeds support WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND.
Donations are 100% tax deductible.
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Very special thanks to our donors that have supported WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND.
Amy Bernstein
Amy Cappellazzo & Joanne Rosen
Andrea Rosen
Beth Rudin DeWoody
Caryn Wechsler
Connie Hansen & Russell Peacock
David de Rothschild
Elise Jaffe & Jeffrey Brown
Franco Avella
Greg Miller
Joanne Cassullo
Janina Quint & David Leiber
Joe Lovett & Jim Cottrell
Karen Ranucci
Leonardo Bonanni & Family
Marc Robbins
Maurice Russell & Jorge Fontanez
Pam Jones and Craig Russell
Sharon Davis
Virginia Hatley
William Floyd
Thank You Credits
Adam Weinberg
Beth Rudin DeWoody
Catherine Gund – Aubin Pictures
Diego Pompeo – Autorita’ Portuale di Napoli
Franco Avella – Integrated Industries
Joe & Kim Carroll
Jonathan Liebmann – Propertuity
