LET’S INTRODUCE: a-clip
Where do you look when you want to find films about architecture, urban planning, design or culture? Youtube, Vimeo, maybe on websites of architecture firms or art collectives? And do most of the films you find really appeal to you?
The platform a-clip aims at finding exactly these films, archiving them and making them available to everybody. This has resulted in a library of currently more than 1000 films, which is constantly growing.
The people behind a-clip are Fred and Yamen, among others. We talked to them about the platform.
a-clip was launched in 2007 under the name architekturclips as a project of the film production OFFscreen. Fred Plassmann, co-founder of architekturclips and OFFscreen, studied interdisciplinary architecture at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee. In his master student year he started to get more involved with film and architecture in film. While Fred worked as an architect after his studies, a film and media network developed around him in parallel, consisting of people who tried out their skills in the post-reunification period, realized video installations, DJ'd in clubs. This gave birth to the media production OFFscreen in 2000. At the same time, Fred is very frustrated by the work as an architect:
„Many projects, even though you put your heart and soul into them, just ended up in the drawer".
As more and more small filmproductions and commissions come in, he focuses on filmmaking. However, the interest in film among architects is rather low in the early 2000s. When Fred himself starts to research and look for films in the field of architecture, he notices that it is very difficult to find good contributions on the net. Through this desire to make and see films about architecture and the realization of this gap in the film world, came the first idea for architekturclips.
The idea was to search for films, write to the filmmakers, collect, archive and make the film available to the masses. With Isabel Schmidt, he developed the first version of the website, which went online in 2007.
In order to be able to support the site and the constant work on it through donations, the supporting association urbanfilmlab e.V. was founded in 2011.
There is a continuous search for films and filmmakers are contacted. Every Monday architekturclips published three new films and a newsletter went out to about 4000 people. The site is well received and seems to have touched a nerve. All the more bitter the shock when architekturclips is hacked in 2017. The fact that all films are physically on the server of the creators of the site is a great luck.
So the work begins to take the site off the net, back up all the content and gradually build a new website.
Two years ago, Yamen came across Fred while attending an architecture film seminar and the two got to know each other. Since then they have been working together on rebuilding the site and other film projects.
When selecting the films to be posted on the website, the makers of a-clip aim to remain independent and present informative films with a certain artistic appeal and dramaturgy.
"We don't want to show glamour and image films" says Fred in conversation with us. However, with the construction of the new website, there is also the new claim to focus even more on sustainable architecture. In addition to the personal close collaboration with Architects4Future, the idea of climate justice will also be further promoted and advanced on the website.
With the launch of the new site, the event series "a-clip goes local" is also being revived. In order to promote direct exchange among each other, film evenings with subsequent discussions will be held at various locations.
The a-clip website has been restructured a little, offers an even wider range of films and already contains more than 1000 short films. An official re-launch of the site will take place on Thursday, May 25:
Are you a filmmaker yourself and do you deal with architecture, urban planning or culture? Fred and Yamen are always happy about new contacts and new short films (up to 15 minutes) that can be shown on a-clip. Just send them a mail to:
If you want to support a-clip in any other way, you can do so by making a donation.
Links: urbanfilmlab.org, offscreen.de, a-clip.de
Instagram: arch_clips, offscreen_media
Photos © a-clip