Architecture and Humans is a documentary series on Al Jazeera 360, hosted by journalist Muna Hawwa, that looks at buildings as more than buildings. Across eight episodes, Muna walks through streets and squares from Casablanca to the Gulf to occupied Palestine, asking what architecture does to the people who live inside it. How a wall changes a city. How a high-rise shapes who belongs. How design becomes politics.
Executive Producer
1 season
Director & Scriptwriter
Selected episodes
Genre
Documentary Series.
Released date
8
Production year
2023
Filming Locations:
Turkey, Qatar, Netherland, England, Morocco, Algeria
Creative Approach
The show treats architecture as a story about power. Every episode starts with a building or a city and ends somewhere bigger: identity, occupation, class, memory. We didn't want a series about beautiful design. We wanted a series that asked who buildings are really for, and what they do to the people who weren't asked.
Concept and Style
The visual language is investigative. Muna walks the spaces herself, on camera, in the actual streets the episode is about. The show uses cinematic reenactments to bring history into the present, and the editing keeps the pace of a documentary, not a travel show. Form follows the politics of the place.
On this Project
on a subject I had no prior background in. The hardest part was translation, not architecture. Most of the source material is academic, and most viewers aren't architects. The job was making the ideas land for someone watching on their phone, without dumbing any of it down. The reach the show ended up getting told us we got that part right.
