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Architecture

Architecture


BAUHAUS SPIRIT: 100 YEARS OF BAUHAUS

Directed by Niels Bolbrinker and Thomas Tielsch

Celebrate the 100th anniversary of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus with this lively and wide-ranging exploration of the movement uniting modern design, art, architecture and performing arts with communal social living to form an academic discipline and utopian way of life. Combining free imagination and play with strict structure, Bauhaus' members included Anni Albers, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and more. The most comprehensive film on its subject to date, Bauhaus Spirit explores this influential 20th-century movement's history, legacy, and continued relevance in an age where function and environmental sustainability have taken on new urgency.

DVD (English, German, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2018 / 90 minutes

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ART HOUSE

Director: Don Freeman

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.

DVD / 2015 / 87 minutes

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CONCRETE LOVE

Director: Maurizius Staerkle Drux

Gottfried Bohm is widely regarded as Germany's preeminent architect. The son of a master builder of churches, he's also the patriarch of a modern architecture dynasty to which his three sons Stephan, Peter and Paul belong. But with the death of Gottfried's wife Elisabeth, also an architect and a key source of inspiration for all the Bohm builders, the family loses its emotional lodestone.

Concrete Love paints an intimate portrait of the complexity and inseparability of life, love and art.

DVD (German with English subtitles) / 2015 / 88 minutes

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NEW RIJKSMUSEUM, THE

Director: Oeke Hoogendijk

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

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STRANGE AND FAMILIAR: ARCHITECTURE ON FOGO ISLAND

Director: Marcia Connelly & Katherine Knight

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.

DVD / 2014 / 54 minutes

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ABSENT HOUSE, THE

By Ruben Abruna

A designer from Puerto Rico pioneered green architecture thirty years ago, and today he confronts climate change with sustainable constructions such as a house without a roof that is completely independent of the power and water utilities, a micro-eco-house on wheels, a pre-designed sustainable house, a parachute-house and a solar-electric car, among others.

When architect Fernando Abruna Charneco, FAIA, began designing in the 1970's many dubbed him as "crazy" for putting nature first before erecting a building, a practice which later would be labeled as sustainable green architecture. He inherited the design mantra of "doing more with less" from his mentor R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the Geodesic Dome and the Dymaxion car, with whom he worked as an apprentice.

In times of climate change and the doomsday consequences it entails, THE ABSENT HOUSE delivers a much-needed, hopeful, pro-active message that we can live sustainably while preserving the planet for future generations.

DVD (Color) / 2013 / 55 minutes

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SAGRADA: THE MYSTERY OF CREATION

Director: Stefan Haupt

One of the most iconic structures ever built, Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia is a unique and fascinating architectural project conceived by Antoni Gaudi in the late 19th century. More than 125 years after construction began, the basilica still remains unfinished. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation celebrates Gaudi's vision and the continuing work of architects as they strive to complete the colossal project while delving into the process of artistic creation in a historical context.

La Sagrada Familia was commissioned by the Order of St Joseph in 1882. After conflicts arose between the Order and the original architect, 31 year old Antoni Gaudi was hired to complete the design. A devout Catholic and architectural prodigy, Gaudi envisioned a place of worship that combined elements of classic French Gothic style and the curvilinear, organic aspects of the budding Art Nouveau school.

Despite decades of delays, thousands of artisans, laborers, and designers have contributed to the ambitious and glorious landmark. Inspired by Gaudi's vision, the film explores our fundamentally human search for the meaning of existence, and the quest for creative expression.

In the midst of the hustle and bustle of the Catalonian metropolis, the documentary investigates the structural developments of the Sagrada Familia while allowing the audience time to observe, perceive, and reflect upon the historical, artistic and personal significance of the basilica.

DVD (Catalan, Spanish, French, and German with English Subtitles) / 2013 / 90 minutes

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SUKKAH CITY

Director: Jason Hutt

When best-selling author Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein) began to build his first sukkah, a small hut that Jews build and dwell in every fall for the holiday of Sukkot, he wanted to move beyond the generic plywood boxes and canvas tents that have become the unimaginative status quo. He discovered that while the bible outlines the basic parameters for what a sukkah should look like and how it should function, it leaves plenty of room for variation and interpretation. Foers thought, 'what if contemporary architects and designers were challenged to design and construct twelve radical sukkahs? What would they come up with?' And so was born the design competition and exhibition known as "Sukkah City."

Sukkah City chronicles the architecture competition created by bestselling author Joshua Foer and Roger Bennett (Reboot co-founder) that explored the creative potential of the ancient Jewish sukkah and created a temporary exhibition of 12 newly designed sukkahs in the heart of New York City. The film goes behind the scenes of the jury day, the construction, and the exhibition to provide an entertaining and inspiring portrait of the project's visionary architects, planners and structures and celebrates an exciting, singular moment in the American Jewish experience.

DVD / 2013 / 67 minutes

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16 ACRES

Director: Richard Hankin

The rebuilding of ground zero is one of the most architecturally, politically, and emotionally complex urban renewal projects in history. The struggle has encompassed eleven years, nineteen government agencies, a dozen projects and over $20 billion. Aside from the engineering challenges, several constituencies-politicians, developers, architects, insurance companies, local residents, and relatives of 9/11 victims-profess a claim to the site and are often in conflict with one another. According to The New York Times, "Where some saw lucrative real estate, others saw a graveyard. Where some saw Rockefeller Center or Lincoln Center or Grand Central Terminal, others saw Gettysburg."

Today, three thousand workers are building four of the tallest skyscrapers in America, a train station, a performing arts center and a sacred memorial and museum. What will emerge in downtown Manhattan will redefine the city and country for generations.

16 Acres is the story of how and why this historic project got built. At the heart of the story is the dramatic tension between noblest intentions, the desire of everyone involved to "get it right," and the politics, hubris, ego, and ideology. As with all great urban projects, from the Pyramids to Rome's Colleseum to Rockefeller Center, a small group of powerful people will dictate the outcome. With inside access to the project and these key players, 16 Acres tells the story behind the headlines.

Featuring Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor George Pataki, Chris Ward (Executive Director of the Port Authority), developer Larry Silverstein, architects Daniel Libeskind, David Childs, and Michael Arad, and relatives and advocates of the 9/11 victims. The also introduces a supporting cast of Pritzker-prize winning international architects and engineers; influential journalists who have covered the rebuilding; construction workers, as well as neighbors, critics and observers who are very much part of the fabric of New York.

DVD / 2012 / 95 minutes

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HUMAN SCALE, THE

Directed by Andreas M. Dalsgaard

Influential Danish architect Jan Gehl argues that we can build cities in a way which takes human needs for inclusion and intimacy into account.

50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, by 2050 it will be 80%. Cities have become the primary human habitat. According to revolutionary Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, if we are to make cities sustainable and livable for people we must re-imagine the very foundations of modern urban planning. Rather than examining buildings and urban structures themselves, Gehl and his team meticulously study the in-between spaces of urban life, the places where people meet, interact, live, and behave.

How do the spaces that surround us enhance or disturb our interactions with others? How can we make our streets more accessible by foot or bike? Through his world acclaimed work, Gehl has been leading a revolution in urban planning that has been transforming cities worldwide. From the expanded pedestrian spaces in New York's Union Square, to Copenhagen's famed bike lanes, to the rebuilding of earthquake devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, Gehl's team bring real solutions that promise a more humanistic dimension to cities where people are not displaced by congested streets, skyscrapers, and the car-centric urbanism of the 1960s and '70s.

Stunningly photographed, THE HUMAN SCALE travels around the world to explore how Gehl and other like minded designers, city planners, and urban activists have begun to transform such cities as as New York, Beijing, Christchurch, and London.

DVD / 2012 / (Grades 8-12, College, Adult) / 77 minutes

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OYLER HOUSE, THE

Director: Mike Dorsey

In 1959, a working-class government employee named Richard Oyler, living in the tiny desert town of Lone Pine, California, asked world-famous modern architect Richard Neutra to design his modest family home. To Oyler's surprise, Neutra agreed. Thus began an unlikely friendship that would last for the rest of Neutra's life.

Considered the "father of California Modern Architecture," Time Magazine put Richard Neutra on their cover in 1949, ranking him second only to Frank Lloyd Wright among America's greatest architects. The Oyler House: Richard Neutra's Desert Retreat explores how a man of his stature came to befriend this modest, small-town family, and his love for the home's stunning desert setting, which Neutra compared to the grandness of the mystical Gobi Desert.

Now owned by the actress Kelly Lynch (Road House, Drugstore Cowboy) and her writer-producer husband Mitch Glazer (Scrooged, Magic City), the post & beam-style home and its exotic surroundings shine through beautiful 5K digital cinematography, and the story comes to life through interviews with Richard Oyler, Kelly Lynch, Neutra's two sons, including modern architect Dion Neutra, and well-known Los Angeles real estate agent Crosby Doe, who has represented homes by some of history's greatest modern architects.

DVD / 2012 / 46 minutes

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BIOPHILIC DESIGN: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LIFE

By Stephen R. Kellert and Bill Finnegan

A design revolution that connects buildings to the natural world, buildings where people feel and perform better.

Biophilic Design is an innovative way of designing the places where we live, work, and learn. We need nature in a deep and fundamental fashion, but we have often designed our cities and suburbs in ways that both degrade the environment and alienate us from nature.

The recent trend in green architecture has decreased the environmental impact of the built environment, but it has accomplished little in the way of reconnecting us to the natural world, the missing piece in the puzzle of sustainable development.

Come on a journey from our evolutionary past and the origins of architecture to the world's most celebrated buildings in a search for the architecture of life. Together, we will encounter buildings that connect people and nature--hospitals where patients heal faster, schools where children's test scores are higher, offices where workers are more productive, and communities where people know more of their neighbors and families thrive.

Featured are communities and buildings from Scandinavia, Germany, France and Britain to the Canadian and American northwest, American southwest, and New England. They include: California Academy of Sciences, Doernbecher Children's Hospital, Fallingwater, Viaduc des Arts, Google/YouTube Headquarters, Sahlgrenska Hospital (Psychiatric Department), High Point (Seattle Housing Authority), Johnson Wax Building, Sidwell Friends Middle School, Oxford Museum of Natural History, Village Homes (Davis, CA), and Kroon Hall (Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies).

Amongst those interviewed are: Edward O. Wilson, Bill McDonough, Judi Heerwagen, Jason McLennan, Tim Beatley, Bill Browning, Bert Gregory, Kent Bloomer, Claire Cooper Marcus, Michael Taylor, David Orr, Gus Speth, and Richard Louv.

Biophilic Design points the way toward creating healthy and productive habitats for modern humans.

DVD / 2011 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 62 minutes

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EAMES: THE ARCHITECT AND THE PAINTER

Directors: Jason Cohn & Bill Jersey

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America's most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life - from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age - has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: the Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

DVD / 2011 / 82 minutes

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HOW MUCH DOES YOUR BUILDING WEIGH, MR. FOSTER?

Director: Norberto Lopez Amado & Carlos Carcas

A portrait of one of the world's premier architects, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? follows Norman Foster's unending quest to improve the quality of life through design. By revealing his origins to how his dreams and influences inspired the design of emblematic projects like the world's largest building and its tallest bridge, Foster offers some striking solutions to humanity's increasing demand on urban centers.

DVD / 2011 / 78 minutes

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I.M. PEI: BUILDING CHINA MODERN

Directed by Anne Makepeace

Architect I.M. Pei returns to his home city of Suzhou, China to build a modern museum that complements the architecture of the 2,500 year-old city and sets a course for modern Chinese architecture.

I.M. Pei has been called the most important living modern architect, defining the landscapes of some of the world's greatest cities. A monumental figure in his field and a laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, Pei is the senior statesman of modernism and last surviving link to such great early architects as Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.

Entering into the twilight of his career and well into his eighties when the project began, Pei returns to his ancestral home of Suzhou, China to work on his most personal project to date. He is commissioned to build a modern museum in the city's oldest neighborhood which is populated by classical structures from the Ming and Qing dynasties. For the architect who placed the pyramid at the Louvre, the test to integrate the new with the old is familiar but still difficult. The enormous task is to help advance China architecturally without compromising its heritage. In the end, what began as his greatest challenge and a labor of sentiment, says Pei, ultimately becomes "my biography."

DVD / 2010 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 53 minutes

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GRAND PARIS: THE PRESIDENT AND THE ARCHITECT

By Bregtje van der Haak

Paris was the first truly modern large city. But it has remained largely unchanged since the 1860s.

Now, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has a vision to turn Paris into a model super-metropolis for the 21st century - a post-Kyoto sustainable city of 12 million that will break down the distinction between downtown and suburb, and that will drive France's economic growth. He calls it "Grand Paris" and he is determined that it will be the crown jewel of his legacy.

To realize his vision, Sarkozy's government engages 10 star architects, including France's Djamel Klouche and Roland Castro, Mike Davies from the UK, and Winy Maas, from Holland. Their mission: to spend a year rethinking Paris.

GRAND PARIS offers a compelling and sometimes suspenseful chronicle of the process, as the architects try to distill months of research and discussion into workable plans. It takes us inside some of the world's top architectural firms, as they compete for an opportunity to reshape one of the world's greatest cities.

The film focuses particularly on Winy Maas, whose designs include the Netherlands' pavilion at the 2000 World's Fair, and master plans for an eco-city in Spain and for the Dutch town of Almere.

The challenges he and the other architects face are immense. How can industrial production and the knowledge economy be integrated? Should the city have one center, or be multi-polar? What kinds of transportation hubs are needed? How can residents of city and suburbs - separated physically, economically and by social status - be brought together in solidarity?

Maas begins with aerial and walking tours of the city, and with interviews with people living in the region. The result is a catalog of the seemingly intractable problems that have plagued Paris for well over a century. They include the stark separation between the posh neighborhoods of the city proper and the sprawling suburbs that ring the downtown, a lack of effective public transit, an extreme housing shortage, and neighborhoods that combine old village centres with bland towers of low-cost housing units. According to fellow architect Patrick Celeste, the city is "a mosaic of obstacles."

In addition to the demands of the Grand Paris project, Maas and the other architects in the film waver between being impressed with Sarkozy's vision, and worrying that they are simply being used for political purposes. For French architects the question is a particularly burning one. Are they being courted to truly bring about effective change in the city? Or to burnish the reputation of a leader whose politics many dislike?

Despite the challenges, the Grand Paris architects are imbued with a sense of optimism and possibility. But when the world's economy comes near collapse, the planners must face the possibility that growth can no longer be taken for granted, and that the public may have lost the taste for large-scale projects.

Will Paris be a bold model for future urban development? Or will the problems of the last 150 years drag on for decades to come?

GRAND PARIS can be viewed in conjunction with Paris, Ring Road, an exploration of the changes wrought by the Boulevard Peripherique circling the city; and Paris, 19th century, on the dramatic overhaul of the city led by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s. Together, a triology of films on the dynamic evolution of an iconic global city.

DVD (Color) / 2009 / 50 minutes

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BIRD'S NEST: HERZOG AND DE MEURON IN CHINA

By Christoph Schaub & Michael Schindhelm

Many events for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games took place in the brand new, 100,000-seat National Stadium. Design plans for this massive structure began in 2003, when Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were selected by the Chinese government to design the new stadium, which because of its curved steel-net walls was soon dubbed by locals as the "bird's nest."

BIRD'S NEST chronicles this five-year effort, as well as Herzog and de Meuron's design for a new city district in Jinhua, involving hotels, office and residential buildings. Both projects involved complex and often difficult negotiations and communications between two cultures, two architectural traditions and two political systems. Herzog and de Meuron, the Basle-based architects, find themselves working with China's largest state construction company, Chinese artist and architect Ai Wei Wei, lawyers, and countless government bureaucrats.

The film reveals how Chinese cultural tradition affects both projects, with the architects carefully researching esthetic and philosophical concepts of Chinese society and culture, attempting to define universal qualities of "beauty" and being careful to avoid imposing Western ideas, and above all to create buildings that will blend in culturally by being sensitive to Chinese cultural traditions and ways of living.

In addition to following the progress of both projects, from initial design and groundbreaking, BIRD'S NEST features interviews with Herzog and de Meuron, Chinese architects Ai Wei Wei and Yu Qiu Rong, plus additional commentary by cultural advisor Dr. Uli Sigg, the former Swiss Ambassador to China, Professor Zhi Yin of Beijing's Tsinhua University, and Li Aiqing, Chairman of Beijing State-Owned Assets Management.

In showing the cultural barriers, political pressures, aesthetic concepts, client demands, and budgetary limitations of these major architectural projects-one intended to promote China's international appearance, the other designed to cater to the daily needs of the Chinese people-BIRD'S NEST explores how such international endeavors are helping to develop a "new tradition" in architecture.

"For those of you who aren't yet obsessed with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron-the Swiss architects behind London's Tate Modern, the Barcelona Forum, the de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, Allianz Arena in Munich, and 40 Bond Street in NYC-we think the stadium they've built in Beijing for this summer's Olympic Games might push you over the edge." - Good Magazine

DVD (Color) / 2008 / 88 minutes

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FUTURE OF MUD, THE: A TALE OF HOUSES AND LIVES IN DJENNE

Directed by Susan Vogel

Through the story of a mason in Djenne, Komusa Tenapo, and his family, this documentary examines an African tradition of mud architecture in Mali. The environmental genius of these ancient construction techniques - thick walls with tiny windows that keep the interiors cool despite the stifling heat - is expressed in strikingly beautiful designs that have won the town of Djenne designation as a World Heritage site.

THE FUTURE OF MUD reveals Komusa's hand building methods, utilizing sun-dried bricks made of mud from the flood plain which contains decayed fish, and cattle manure that are mixed with organic materials such as straw and rice chaff. The film shows him at work on two building sites, and at the annual repair of the Great Mosque, employing thousand-year-old construction techniques, plus the secret knowledge he inherited from his family of masons, including religious rituals to protect homes and workers from evil spirits.

Komousa, family members and Madame Diallo, a Cultural Heritage official, present information on the history of Malian architecture. The film also shows the annual replastering of Dejenne's Great Mosque, the largest mud brick building in the world, a day-long, boisterous community effort, and a major public celebration observed by local residents and tourists.

DVD (Color) / 2007 / 58 minutes

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE HISTORY OF VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE

By Jesper Wachtmeister

GREAT EXPECTATIONS introduces us to the most significant architectural movements and personalities of the 20th century, including, among many others, Le Corbusier's functionalist cities, Buckminster Fuller's lightweight geodesic domes, Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67 prefab apartments, Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum and other anthroposophy buildings in Switzerland, Oscar Niemeyer's sleek urban designs for Brasilia, Paolo Soleri's "archology" of crystal-like desert cities, Antti Lovag's curved surfaces of Palais Bulles in France, Jacque Fresco's utopian Venus Project in Florida, and Peter Cook and Colin Fournier's biomorphic Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.

Using archival and contemporary footage, animation and interviews, GREAT EXPECTATIONS tells the fascinating story of these grand architectural visions, both realized and unrealized, as explained by great thinkers with revolutionary, if not always successful, ideas.

DVD (Color) / 2007 / 52 minutes

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GREENING OF SOUTHIE, THE

Directed by Ian Cheney

The story of Boston's first LEED-certified residential green building, and the people who made it possible.

In the traditionally Irish-American working-class neighborhood of South Boston, MA, a new kind of building has taken shape. From wheatboard cabinetry to recycled steel, bamboo flooring to dual-flush toilets, the Macallen building is something different: a leader in the emerging field of environmentally friendly design.

But Boston's steel-toed union workers aren't sure they like it. And when things on the building start to go wrong, the young developer has to keep the project from unraveling.

Building Boston's first LEED Gold-certified building turns out to be harder than anyone thought. Yet among the I-beams and brickwork emerges a small cadre of unlikely environmentalists who come to connect their work with the future of their children

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2007 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 72 minutes

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EDENS LOST AND FOUND - CHICAGO: CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS

City Hall and grass roots groups in Chicago are working on open space, green buildings and an educated citizenry to create a sustainable city.

Chicago is a dynamic and fascinating city with spectacular architecture and a dramatic setting on the shores of Lake Michigan. The largest metropolis between the coasts, it has the biggest population, the most problems...and the greatest potential.

Edens Lost & Found tells Chicago's story by threading together the stories of a diverse group of its active and committed citizens including volunteers, professionals, students and community leaders -- among them, the city's mayor, Richard M. Daley. During his tenure, Chicago made a powerful commitment to open space with the creation of the 24-acre Millennium Park built atop a parking garage in the heart of downtown. The city has also become a laboratory for green architecture with the award-winning City Hall Roof Garden and Green Roof Initiative.

Whole neighborhoods are getting involved in the effort to create more livable communities. Eden Place is a prime example of grassroots determination to reclaim for themselves pieces of Eden that had been lost to generations of apathy.

And out in the suburbs? An Elgin High School environmental instructor convinced the school board to set aside adjacent land as an outdoor classroom and nature preserve. Here, her students are learning to become leaders in the movement to create sustainable ecosystems.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2006 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 57 minutes

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EILEEN GRAY: DESIGNER AND ARCHITECT

By Jorg Bundschuh

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was always ahead of her time. Thirty years after her death, she is still considered as the very essence of the Modern. Everyone has seen her furniture-including the famous Adjustable Table, the Lota Sofa, and the Tube Light-but most people don't really know the designer and architect who created them.

Born to an aristocratic family of Irish-Scottish heritage, Gray studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London before moving to Paris in 1902 where she continued her studies and, in a revolt against prevailing art nouveau conventions, mastered lacquer work and established the Galerie Jean Desert, where she sold her avant-garde, luxury furniture pieces intended both to fulfill a function and to inspire the spirit.

EILEEN GRAY-DESIGNER AND ARCHITECT also examines the history of her architectural creations, including E.1027, one of the most famous houses in architectural history, built in Roquebrune, France, in 1926. This modernist seaside villa-an L-shaped, flat-roofed building with floor-to-ceiling windows and a spiral staircase, utilizing natural light and ventilation-was designed, said Gray, for a "minimum of space and maximum of comfort." E.1027 has today been declared a French national monument and is presently being restored.

Using archival footage, excerpts from Gray's own writings, plus interviews with Jennifer Goff, Curator of the National Museum of Ireland, which houses a permanent Gray exhibition, Philippe Garner of Christie's auction house, and Zeev Aram, Chairman of Aram Designs in London, who today produces reproductions of Gray's furniture, EILEEN GRAY chronicles this resolutely independent designer's artistic formation and bohemian lifestyle, her extensive travels and influences, the development of her distinctive designs, and her relations with fellow artists and architects such as Jean Badovici, Seizo Sugawara and Le Corbusier.

DVD (Color) / 2006 / 52 minutes

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ABORIGINAL ARCHITECTURE: LIVING ARCHITECTURE

Directed by Paul M. Rickard

New structures in seven North American Native communities that reinterpret traditional forms for contemporary purposes.

ABORIGINAL ARCHITECTURE LIVING ARCHITECTURE offers a fascinating in-depth look into the diversity of North American Native architecture. Featuring expert commentary and stunning imagery, this program provides a virtual tour of seven Aboriginal communities -- Pueblo, Mohawk, Inuit, Crow, Navajo, Coast Salish and Haida -- revealing how each is actively reinterpreting and adapting traditional forms for contemporary purposes.

Everyone is familiar with certain types of Aboriginal architecture. Traditional igloos and teepees are two of the most enduring symbols of North America itself. But how much do we really know about the types of structures Native Peoples designed, engineered, and built?

For more than three hundred years, Native communities in North America have had virtually no indigenous architecture. Communities have made do with low-cost government housing and community projects designed by strangers in far away places.

Thankfully, across the continent, political, financial, and cultural changes have created a renaissance of Native design. Modern Aboriginal architects are turning to ancient forms, adapting them in response to changes in the natural and social environment, and creating contemporary structures that hearken to the past.

Employing old and new materials and techniques and with an emphasis on harmony and balance, Native designers are successfully melding current community needs with tradition. The resulting buildings are testaments to the enduring strength and ingenuity of Aboriginal design.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2005 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 93 minutes

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PARIS RING

By Richard Copans

PARIS RING serves as a study of the far-reaching effects of a major, urban project. The Peripherique - the ring road that surrounds the city - offers a stark demarcation between urban environments. On one side lies the elegant city of Paris. On the other is the endless sprawl of contemporary suburbs.

Design work on the road began in 1954, and it opened to traffic 19 years later. Its route mirrors the walls that once ringed Paris, and that were torn down after the First World War made it clear they were no longer effective. A no-man's land sprung up near the walls - home to a working-class and transient population that offended the aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie, and that was eventually displaced by the road.

The construction of the Peripherique - 35 kilometres long, with up to eight lanes of traffic and carrying more than a million cars a day - is arguably the most significant project carried out in Paris since Baron Haussmann transformed the city into a modern metropolis in the 1860s.

But where Haussmann's Paris balanced utility with aesthetics, the Peripherique is purely an engineering triumph.

For some, the Peripherique is a blight, a stark separation between city and suburb. For others it represents an economic lifeline without which the city could not survive.

With an unusual combination of spoken and sung commentary, this documentary travels the Peripherique, offering a series of brief cases studies on the changes it has brought to the neighborhoods it borders. A funeral home is separated from the cemetery that once lay just across the road, but now can only be accessed by a circuitous route. A park appears bucolic, until we change point-of-view and see it squeezed between two looming ramps. Quiet streets are assailed by a constant stream of traffic noise.

The film pays particular attention to the transitional spaces between ring road and surrounding areas, and to those who inhabit them: a photographer fascinated by the aesthetics of an exit ramp; a man who "lives like a king" in a trailer below an elevated portion of the road; a developer building a hotel located between the Peripherique, a highway and a railway track; and the construction workers, maintenance staff, homeless people and graffiti artists whose lives are marked by interactions with the ring road.

Their stories are a reminder that even the most utilitarian urban spaces develop their own particular ecology.

The documentary also serves as a valuable companion piece to Paris 19th Century, The Invention of a Modern City, which offers an architectural examination of the legacy of Haussmann's re-development of the city.

DVD (Color) / 2004 / 54 minutes

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REGULAR OR SUPER: VIEWS ON MIES VAN DER ROHE

By Joseph Hillel & Patrick Demers

In 1967, at the end of a career spanning more than six decades, which included the design of the Seagram Building in New York, the Lake Shore Drive Apartment Buildings in Chicago, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, architect Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) designed a simple gas station near Montreal. The story of that gas station serves as the point of departure for REGULAR OR SUPER, which examines Mies' entire body of work (more than 70 buildings) and a sparse style that reflects his motto that "less is more."

Mies began his architectural career in Germany early in the 20th century and during the Thirties taught at the famed Bauhaus School of Art and Design in Berlin. In 1938, after the school was shut down by the Nazis, Mies emigrated to Chicago where he designed 22 buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Over the next three decades, in a radical break from the predominant beaux arts style, he refined a distinctive, modernist architectural style emphasizing glass and steel in a variety of buildings whose structures creatively integrated surrounding public space.

Featuring stylish cinematography and an evocative jazz score, REGULAR OR SUPER illustrates many of Mies' classic buildings, combining these striking facades with observations from some architecture superstars, including Rem Koolhaas, Elizabeth Diller and Phyllis Lambert, which are interlaced with anecdotes from customers and neighbors of the gas station, plus comments from his biographer and family members.

REGULAR OR SUPER is a fascinating and informative introduction to the work of one of the 20th century's most influential architects and a thought-provoking demonstration of the social and artistic contributions that architecture at its best can make to our urban environments.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2004 / 57 minutes

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KOCHUU: JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE / INFLUENCE & ORIGIN

By Jesper Wachtmeister

KOCHUU is a visually stunning film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition, and its impact on the Nordic building tradition. Winding its way through visions of the future and traditional concepts, nature and concrete, gardens and high-tech spaces, the film explains how contemporary Japanese architects strive to unite the ways of modern man with the old philosophies in astounding constructions.

KOCHUU, which translates as "in the jar," refers to the Japanese tradition of constructing small, enclosed physical spaces, which create the impression of a separate universe. The film illustrates key components of traditional Japanese architecture, such as reducing the distinction between outdoors and indoors, disrupting the symmetrical, building with wooden posts and beams rather than with walls, modular construction techniques, and its symbiotic relationship with water, light and nature.

The film illustrates these concepts through remarkable views of the Imperial Katsura Palace, the Todai-Ji Temple, the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, the Sony Tower, numerous teahouses and gardens (see link below for complete list), as well as examples of the cross-fertilization evidenced in buildings throughout Scandinavia, and shows how 'invisible' Japanese traditions are evident even in modern, high-tech buildings.

KOCHUU also features interviews with some of Japan's leading architects as well as Scandinavian contemporaries including Pritzker Prize winners Tadao Ando and Sverre Fehn, Toyo Ito, Kazuo Shinohara, Kristian Gullichsen and Juhani Pallasmaa (see link below for complete list and bios).

KOCHUU is a compelling illustration of how the aesthetics of Japanese architecture and design are expressed through simple means, and also shows that the best Japanese architecture, wherever it appears, expresses spiritual qualities that enrich human life.

DVD (Color) / 2003 / 53 minutes

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LAGOS / KOOLHAAS

Written and Directed by Bregtje van der Haak

Lagos' population is expected to reach 24 million people by 2020, which would make it the third largest city in the world. Every hour, 21 new inhabitants set out to start a life in the city, a life that is highly unpredictable and requires risk taking, networking and improvisation as essential strategies for survival.

Rem Koolhaas - winner of architecture's Nobel, the Pritzker Architecture Prize - is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard. For the past four years Koolhaas and students from The Harvard Project on the City have come to Lagos regularly to research the type of urban environment that is produced by explosive population growth. The Project on the City is framed by two concepts: academia's bewilderment with new forms of accelerated urbanization in developing regions and the maelstrom of redevelopment in existing urban areas; and, second, the failure of the design professions to adequately cope with these changes.

LAGOS / KOOLHAAS follows Koolhaas during his research in Lagos over a period of two years as he wanders through the city, talking with people and recognizing the problems with water, electricity and traffic. But instead of judging the city to be doomed, he is able to interpret this 'culture of congestion' positively, thereby creating a completely new concept of the big city.

For example, in most North American cities we grumble about the traffic and turn up the CD. In Lagos, traffic jams are such an overwhelming feature of the city that they have become a key marketplace. When the cars stop, the trading begins. Or, as Koolhaas's report puts it, "the ubiquitous traffic jam: lulled in congestion, captive to the road's breadth, and thriving with entrepreneurial activity."

For Koolhaas, the key to understanding a city such as Lagos is the realization that it is not the controllable result of Western planning. The city should be seen as an anarchic organism in which the enterprise of the inhabitants turns any apparent disadvantage into an advantage: "Anguish over the city's shortcomings in traditional urban systems obscures the reasons for the continued, exuberant existence of Lagos and other megacities like it. These shortcomings have generated ingenious, critical alternative systems."

Thus, for Koolhaas and his team, Lagos is a case study of a city at the forefront of a globalizing modernity: "Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos . . ."

DVD (Color) / 2002 / 55 minutes

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IN THE MIND OF THE ARCHITECT

Directed by Tim Clark

From the Modernist ideas of Europe and North America, through the eccentricity of Postmodernism, and to the importance of climate and place, this 3-part series from Australia is an investigation into the eclectic world of architects and their creations.

Featuring buildings that are striking, controversial or simply beautiful, and concentrating on the views and motivations of award-winning architects, including Harry Seidler, Richard Leplastrier, Paul Katsieris, Peter Corrigan, Bernard Seeber, Phillip Cox, Sean Godsell and many others, IN THE MIND OF THE ARCHITECT explores connections between architecture and the human condition, and discusses the brutal politics of building structures.

Part 1, KEEPING THE FAITH explores the relationship between architect and client, including projects where the designer is the client. Looking at houses they design for themselves, for government and for big business, Part 1 also examines the fight between those who prefer innovation, and those who want 'nice', conservative buildings. Is it the architect's responsibility to give us what we want, or to lead us where we haven't been before?

Part 2, THE PUBLIC GOOD: With capital on the move from public to private spending, architects must straddle both worlds and balance the desires of business clients with the obligation to the public good. Cities are the battleground, driven by pressure for commercial development. So who makes the decision? Who cares about the public good with respect to large commercial developments? THE PUBLIC GOOD looks at these and other issues surrounding public development.

Part 3, CORRUGATED DREAMS: The potential of architecture is to enable things to happen - to enhance, not restrict. What gives an architect the confidence to build a great building? Is it a good site, tolerant neighbors, or a gifted contractor? Or is the most important factor a brave client with lots of money? From seemingly hopeless suburbs to a downtown hotel, CORRUGATED DREAMS visits the artistic possibilities of architecture, within the practical context of the 21st Century consumer's needs.

Ultimately IN THE MIND OF THE ARCHITECT explains the process we call architecture - its philosophy and its essential relationship with people.

3 DVDs (Color) / 2000 / 165 minutes

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