The film follows Ada Karmi-Melamede, one of the most accomplished female architects in the world, yet her work has remained largely unrecognized beyond architectural circles. In the 1970s, she moved to New York from Israel, following her husband’s rising career, and spent the next 15 years balancing academia, large-scale public projects, and motherhood. While teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, she contributed to major urban initiatives, including a master plan for Con Edison, a study for mixed-use development along the proposed Second Avenue Subway, and a 1978 housing competition on Roosevelt Island—all while raising three young children.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Okay, Iman, let's start.
00:01What do you want to know?
00:03I want everyone to know that you love me.
00:08She's one of the most prolific and profound women architects in the world today.
00:12Ada is not like Ada, a shadow of light.
00:15I think it's beautiful, what she does.
00:19The role of architecture is to find the cohesion between things.
00:24Because without a cohesion we have no language.
00:27It's also true for life, isn't it?
00:29Yes, it's also true for life.
00:31Most of the buildings, almost until the end of the 19th century,
00:33were buildings that had a center.
00:36But you could say, if you were a little more romantic,
00:39that when there was a center, there was a heart to the building.
00:41So today there are buildings that don't have a heart,
00:43for all intents and purposes.
00:45Do you think it was harder for women?
00:47I thought that it's a profession only for men like my brother and my father.
00:51It was really, really tough.
00:54Working on the Supreme Court changed my life.
00:56It's crazy.
00:57Everyone thinks you should enter into some bombastic lobby,
01:01but you have this grand staircase,
01:03and then Jerusalem is right in front of you.
01:05I'm excited.
01:07One of the conditions of the Supreme Court contract
01:09was that she would only spend a few weeks a year outside of Israel.
01:12But she had three kids in the States.
01:14Is there something you want to ask me?
01:16Yes. How do you manage to love me for so many years?
01:20What's so funny? I'm not with you.
01:23We're not used to thinking about time.
01:25We think that time only happens to others,
01:28but it happens to everybody.
01:29And the alone never gets to be too much?
01:31Of course it's too much, but also togetherness is too much.
01:35It's all a question of proportion.