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Ground has been broken on Roosevelt Island for New York City's newest academic campus - the sustainable, high tech home of Cornell Tech, a radical reconception of graduate level engineering study for the information age. Over the next three years, a stunning complex of architecture and landscape will emerge - a unique hub of high tech research and entrepreneurial activity.
This film tells the story of how political visionaries, educational innovators, architectural designers and philanthropic benefactors have come together to create something that will have an incredible impact on New York City for decades to come.
In this documentary, photographer Don Freeman explores the homes designed and lived in by notable American artists, revealing the inventiveness derived from the dialogue between each artist's practice and the construction of their handmade homes. Ranging from the romantic (Hudson River School painter Frederic Church's Olana, framing views of the Catskills to echo his paintings), to the futuristic (Paolo Soleri's silt-casted structure Cosanti growing out of his bell-making experiments in the Arizona desert), to the sublime (George Nakashima's mid-century modern ode to the beauty and versatility of wood), what they all have in common is a fierce spirit of individual expression that deserves deeper examination in this age of architectural standardization.
American-born Charles Jencks is a landscape architect, theorist and critic best known for his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, Scotland, and his writings on post-modernism. He has designed landscapes projects around the world, including Parco Portello in Milan, Northumberlandia near Newcastle, England and Wu Chi at the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing. Jencks is also co-founder of the Maggie's Centres - a series of cancer care centres designed By leading modern architects, named in honour of his late wife Maggie Keswick. In this talk, Jencks discusses his recent project Holding the Eco-line, a landscape design for the Suncheon Bay expo in 2013. He explains the development of the design and his Korean hosts' reaction to it, as well as the importance of symbolism in his work, and his latest creation the Crawick Multiverse, inspired By cutting edge theories of the origin of the universe.
Keith Bradley is senior partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, based in Bath, UK. Bradley led FCBS's best known work, the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Housing Project in Cambridge. He's also worked on major urban regeneration schemes, public museums, galleries and academic buildings. In this talk, Bradley explores FCBS's Manchester School of Art extension building, completed in April 2013. He discusses the evolution of the design, which includes a vertical gallery space where students can showcase their work, an interactive hybrid studio intended to foster creative collaboration between students from different disciplines and triple height columns with a relief cast decorative detail inspired By the textiles of Lewis Day, who taught at the school a century ago. Manchester School of Art was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize.
In 2003, the ambitious renovation of one of the world's greatest museums began. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to a glorious collection including masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer, was supposed to reopen its doors in 2008 after five years of construction. But from the start, the project was opposed by unyielding bureaucrats and public resistance. The museum directors battled politicians, designers, curators and even the Dutch Cyclists Union as they struggled to complete the renovation and put its massive collection back on public display. Five years late, with costs exceeding half a billion dollars, the museum finally reopened.
Oeke Hoogendijk's epic documentary captures the entire story from design to completion, offering a fly-on-the-wall perspective on one of the most challenging museum construction projects ever conceived. With its decade-long scope, the film reveals a surprisingly dramatic story that art and architecture lovers will not want to miss.
DVD (Dutch, English, French, and Spanish with English Subtitles) / 2014 / 131 minutes
In a rapidly urbanized world, what does the future hold for traditional rural societies? As Fogo Island, a small community off the coast of Newfoundland, struggles to sustain its unique way of life in the face of a collapse of its cod fishing industry, architect Todd Saunders and social entrepreneur Zita Cobb's vision for positive change results in the envisioning, designing and building of strikingly original architecture that will become a catalyst for social change.
Experience this staggeringly beautiful place and how the community and local workers, together with Saunders and Cobb, come together and play a role in this creative process during a time of optimism and uncertain hope. Change is coming to Fogo Island.
James Wines come from Chicago and studied art and art history at Syracuse University. From 1955 to 1968 he worked as a sculptor and exhibited widely receiving many fellowships and grants. Alison Sky graduated in Fine Arts at Adelphi University and also received many fellowships. In 1970. Wines, Sky and Michelle Stones founded SITE, an interdisciplinary architecture and design organisation for exploring new ideas for the visual environment. SITE has always been a collaboration of Artists architects, sociologists, psychologists, whose work is therefore much oriented to information and site. As Wines says they start with information. And that information is then recycled through an art-making process, letting it be invaded By all kinds of outside ideas which totally change all context of the building. In their recorded talk, Wines and Sky illustrated their ideas with a number of their projects. Including some of the renowned Best Products buildings. They deal with different situations that seem to be typical and, By fusing them create a new relationship between ideas, a new structure
This rare recording By the Australian Broadcasting Corporation features the NSW Premier Jo Cahill and Jorn Utzon speaking at the launch of the Sydney Opera house appeal on 7 August 1957; and a discussion between Henry Ashworth, Professor of Architecture at University of Sydney and Chairman of the Opera House competition jury, and his fellow assessors Eero Saarinen and Sir Leslie Martin, Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University, on 29 January 1957. We are grateful to Warwick Mehaffey, Acoustics Engineer at ABC and advisor to the SOH for sourcing the recordings.
One of the foremost architects of his generation, IM Pei's reputation rests on buildings such as the John Hancock Tower in Boston, the Mile High Centre in Denver, the Louvre in Paris and the Bank of China in Hong Kong. While he kept faith with the founding principles of the International Style, he applied them to buildings that were all his own. In this talk, part of a series conducted By the architectural publisher John Peter from the 1950s onward, Pei discusses the enduring influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, the crucial distinction between having a style and designing with style in mind, the limits to technology's influence on architecture, French hostility towards his Louvre redevelopment, and the difference between the European and American traditions: "they built Rolls Royce, we built Ford".
Richard Neutra is famous for adapting the International Style to Southern California with domestic projects that included the Lovell House, the von Sternberg House and the Kaufmann House. This talk, one of a series conducted By the architectural publisher John Peter, was recorded in 1955 at Neutra's own home in Los Angeles, the metal and glass Neutra Research House, an early example of the houses that made his name. Here Neutra explores the psychological and biological approach behind his work - reflective of the intellectual environment of the Vienna of his youth.
The late Philip Johnson, one-time partner of Mies van der Rohe, and possibly the most renowned architect of the time, was accused of turning his back on modern architecture in favour of Post-Modern. This he denied, saying 'There's absolutely no way I can get functionalism, structural clarity, simplicity, non-ornament, flat surfaces out of my system ¡K the whole paraphernalia of the International style'.
In his recorded talk he goes on to state that he sees no reason why Modern can't embrace some of the richness and fun he finds in the designs of Sir Edwin Lutyens or, better still, Sir Ernest George, Lutyens' first employer. He elaborates on this idea and shows how he has taken advantage of it in some of his own recent work. As a preamble he takes a look at the streets of London and also tells us what he appreciates about recent British architecture.
Leon Krier was born in Luxembourg in 1946. He studied briefly at Stuttgart University but his basic architectural education come from his older brother Rob Krier (P8216), and his practical experience was in the offices of James Stirling in London and J.P. Kleihuis in Berlin. After 1974 he worked on his own in London and in close association with Maurice Culot (the Belgian architectural historian, teacher at La Cambre School and member of the ARAU research group). He has taught at the AA school and the Royal College of Art in London and at Princeton University and his published theories and designs have had great influence. He says that "his projects are a series of polemical statements, reflections on the specific structure of the European city and opposing the global destruction of European culture through industrialisation". Briefly, he champions the "quarter" of the limited size as the basic of urban design -- the "close-knit scene of community life and loyalties" -- as opposed to the dogma of zoning, and the treatment of buildings as solutions to individual needs regardless of their relationship to their surroundings. In his recorded talk, he outlines simple design precepts and then demonstrates their application in his proposal for the redevelopment of a part of Stockholm, an area to the south of the historical centre.
This rare recording By the Australian Broadcasting Corporation features the NSW Premier Jo Cahill and Jorn Utzon speaking at the launch of the Sydney Opera house appeal on 7 August 1957; and a discussion between Henry Ashworth, Professor of Architecture at University of Sydney and Chairman of the Opera House competition jury, and his fellow assessors Eero Saarinen and Sir Leslie Martin, Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University, on 29 January 1957. We are grateful to Warwick Mehaffey, Acoustics Engineer at ABC and advisor to the SOH for sourcing the recordings.
Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and head of Harvard's department of architecture, was also a talented architectural innovator. His Fagus Factory with Adolf Meyer and his Bauhuas budding in Dessau were remarkable examples of the early International Style. This interview, one of a series conducted By architectural publisher John Peter, was recorded in 1955 in two parts - at Gropius's home in Lincoln, Massachusetts and at his office in Cambridge. Here he describes the origins, philosophy and enduring influence of the Bauhaus, discusses the importance of helping students to find their own way, and predicts a slow but steady move towards pre-fabrication.
Eero Saarinen died just aged 51 at the height of his creative powers. His career was jumpstarted early with the General Motors Technical centre, lauded as the industrial Versaille. He went on to design an array of distinctly different buildings - including the Gateway Arch in St Louis and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, New York - each reflecting the philosophy he shared with Corbusier that every building has within it its own solution. This talk, one of a series conducted By the architectural publisher John Peter, was recorded in 1956 at Saarinen's remodelled Victorian house in Bloomfield, Michigan. Here he discusses the three great Modernist influences: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe; the rise of the automobile and the resulting atomisation of the city; and the great body of advice and wisdom passed on to him from his father, not least that architecture must be approached as an art.