“If You Build It” is a documentary about two artists/architects who start a high school class in a small town with the goal of improving the community and teaching kids design skills. The school district decides to not pay them to teach the class and only give them a small budget, which although later in that year they upped the budget slightly, they still never paid them as teachers. The kids they taught had no idea what the class was about at first, and because of this, the movie does a good job of showing the kids’ grown, both in skill and attitude towards the class. The projects start out simple with the students learning basic building and designing skills and soon after build their own chicken coops. The coop project was a really great idea by the teachers because, while it not only tests and builds upon the kids skills, it also serves a practical purpose. The school is in a rural area, so many of the kids’ families own chickens. The film shows some of these new coops being used after the project. The main project for the class illustrates the intent of the teachers to improve the local community. Each student was to submit a design for a structure that would serve as a local farmers marker, and the winning design would be built to scale and used by the residents of the town. Because of time constraints and money issues, the building doesn’t get built before the school year ends, but some time after the two teachers and some of the students are able to finish. The film ends by showing the farmers market still in use some time after the teachers leave to a new and more fiscally prosperous job in the bay area. Overall, this documentary does a great job of showing how art can be used to make the community a better place and improve the lives of people, whether or not they were involved. While the fact that the teachers weren’t getting paid may have been overused to build sympathy and respect, it wasn’t necessary because their passion to their craft and devotion to the kids and their projects was pretty spectacular.
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