★★★★☆

2008, 58 minutes

The house is a masterpiece. It is perched on a hill overlooking Bordeaux. It’s made of glass and concrete and seemingly nothing else. It has pipes cleverly hidden to the side, a cantilevered roof that seems to defy the laws of physics, and a beautiful center elevator platform for a wheelchair-using owner who commissioned it by telling the architect – Rem Koolhaas, by the way – “I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world.”

The house is also a nuisance. The platform gets stuck. The back staircase is frustrating to navigate. Parts of the physics-defying roof started to rust years ago. The glass needs cleaning and very occasionally shatters whole as the house slowly sinks into the hill. In the summer, the garden door gets too hot to touch. In the winter, rain and snow leak between holes in the walls – holes whose very presence cannot fully be explained.

The documentary is sort of a human-centered flip side of How buildings learn, the absolutely fascinating book written by Stewart Brand (this is the good part; the book is really smart and you can learn a lot from it) and designed by Stewart Brand (this is the bad part; the book’s typesetting is so terrible I literally cannot stand to open it). The movie follows Guadalupe, the person who takes care of the building and sees it not in the first day’s pristine light, but a decade after it was finished, and years after the figurative cracks showed up, and then literal cracks, too. She knows it so intimately that she struggles in explaining it.

My design team watched this documentary during an offsite. I couldn’t attend the showing for reasons I no longer remember; afterwards multiple people came to me and told me “You should watch it. It’s actually about you.”

I watched it yesterday as I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Towards my later years at Medium, more recently at Figma, and increasingly when it comes to UX design as a whole, I feel like a caretaker, a living historian, a person tasked with the sometimes-sisyphean work of preserving the past but not gatekeeping the future, tending to something mostly taken for granted, and knowing something so intimately that you develop a sense of it that is increasingly hard to explain to others. “I don’t know how I know it, but bet $20 this is related to this,” I hear myself saying at work with strange regularity. (I’m far from always being right, but it still surprises me how often I get to be.)

Caretakers burn out, of course. It happened to me a few times. You can take too much care. You can fly so close to the details you forget the color of the sky. There’s enough minutiae for all of the minutes in every day.

And even outside of burnout, things can get weird. Medium’s editor then and Figma’s editor now feel like strange beasts, so complicated that it exceeds any single person’s understanding. One learns about their moods and the good days and the bad days. One can try to placate them, but only partially, and learn to understand them, but only partially. One develops a strange relationship with them, and only gets to observe them even as others assume one controls them; I once gave a talk about a singular keyboard shortcut, one of possibly 5,000 details that could each be a subject of its own conference talk.

But it can also all be wonderful, and beautiful, and meaningful, being what I sometimes jokingly describe “caretakers of undo” – the phrase itself a shibboleth, as I’m always watching whether someone thinks it derogatory or laudatory – and carrying with you that calmness and quiet satisfaction of keeping the strange beast alive and perhaps even happy.

It doesn’t matter that Guadalupe cannot explain how the building’s award-winning architecture works, or why one staircase is designed so differently than the other. The best parts of the movie is watching her own shorthand with the house, that special years-in-the-making universe of tips, and tricks, and hacks, and nods of understanding, and frustrations attenuated by the passage of time, and quirks internalized so long ago that they their sudden disappearance would today itself register as a quirk.

You can develop a relationship with a sophisticated piece of software, like you can with a strange house that has a life of its own. “I want a complex house, because the house will define my world,” said the owner just before his untimely passing, but the house defined someone’s world, anyway.

The house is not beautiful because of the stories of people inside – we never get to see them, by the way, and there is only a 30-second quiet glimpse at the building actually being lived in, at the tail end of the movie. The house is not beautiful because it was designed by a starchitect, or because of the views, or the clarity of its form, or the cantilevered roof, or the cleverly operated portholes. The house is not even beautiful because of all its flaws, although you could find beauty in them, too.

The house is beautiful because you show up every day and try to stop it from getting worse, and occasionally, you show up and make it better.

There won’t be a documentary made with you in it, so no one might ever know. But you will.