Any casual lover of architecture knows the names Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi, but far fewer have heard of Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, or Denise Scott Brown. But that’s not because their work was any less important to the field.
City Dreamers, a documentary directed by Joseph Hillel, sheds light on the work of these four influential women in architecture and design. All now between the ages of 87 and 97, the women broke into the traditionally masculine industry just after the Second World War, when the work to rebuild was plentiful but prominent woman architects were not.

The film’s subjects were chosen because their careers “intersect, resemble, and complement each other,” says Hillel. For starters, their highly original work addressed major societal issues rising at the time, like traffic, population density, green spaces, ghettoization, urban sprawl, and heritage preservation. Sound familiar" We’re still dealing with all these issues today. By examining creative solutions from the past, maybe we’ll be inspired to improve upon them for the cities of the 21st century. Shot on location in Philadelphia, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, City Dreamers features interviews with Lambert, van Ginkel, Oberlander, and Brown, shows off some of the greatest examples of their respective bodies of work, and includes archival materials illustrating how cities have chang...