Videos: The Latest Architecture and News

We’ve all heard the story of the cocktail napkin sketch that inspired a masterwork. Architecture is all about communicating ideas visually, and there is no better way to quickly express an idea than through sketching. But for many students just starting on the path of architecture, the skills to actually create such sketches don't come naturally, and mentors who will take the time to explain such basics can be hard to find.

Geared towards young and aspiring architecture students, a new youtube channel, Themodmin, provides short, free tutorials on how to get the most out of your sketches in their series Architecture Daily Sketches. Covering topics from lineweight to perspective to adding people to your drawings, the videos follow a simple format that is easy to follow. Watch a few of the videos below and head over to their youtube page here for more tutorials.

“As a designer, we create architectural spaces which are de facto instruments—they contain sound, they manipulate it, they can even create sound—so we’re tasked with a very powerful tool for affecting human cognition.”

In an effort to spark new ideas for "zero value landscapes," Amanda Williams has been painting abandoned houses in Chicago's South Side with a "palette of culturally coded, monochromatic colors" to "explore how academic and theoretical definitions of color map across veiled language used in American media/popular culture to describe racially charged city spaces... Think a female Gordon Matta-Clark parading around as a Black Josef Albers," says the artist.

Watch the video above, commissioned by the Chicago Architecture Biennial and produced by Spirit of Space, to learn more.

Surpassing the limitations of static imagery, filmmaker Daniele Marucci creates videos that bridge the filmic and architectonic for a richer and more immersive understanding of buildings and their environments. Marucci works with photographer Enrico Cano to share intimate portraits of buildings that slow down our experience by drawing attention to their subtleties. In such practice, we are given the freedom to survey the architecture but also to let our mind wander, to daydream. Often working in remote locations, the frenetic speed of the city is forgotten when a new intensity takes hold.

In a new segment of the Archiculture extras series, Arbuckle Industries interviews Pratt professors and architects Marc Schaut and Dan Bucsescu, who discuss the extent to which technology has transformed the teaching of architecture, and the necessities of a holistic architecture education. Watch the interview above, and delve into more Archiculture interviews here.

Videos

The online lecture, similar to the podcast, is an easy, often entertaining way of absorbing knowledge and the opinions of thinkers and practitioners from around the world. We've gathered together some of our favourite sources for watching architectural lectures online. Ranging from Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel's famous American Architecture Now interviews with Frank Gehry in 1980 and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown in 1984, to Sir Peter Cook speaking at Frankfurt's Staedelschule in 2012, these open-source films provide invaluable insights into architects and architects throughout recent history.

Check out our favourite sources after the break.

Back in 2012, we found "Empire State of Pen," an amazing video of London-based artist and animator Patrick Vale’s drawing of Manhattan from the perspective of the Empire State Building. Now, Vale has taken a different perspective of the city, this time traveling a bit farther uptown to the Rockefeller Center area. Vale’s new drawing looks south, with the Empire State Building in the center, and the Freedom Tower in the background. To the east you can see the Chrysler Building, and to the west lies the Bank of America Tower in the Times Square area.

Vale started the drawing in December of 2014, when he spent an afternoon in -15 degree weather sketching and taking pictures, which he then took back to his studio to create the piece. The whole process took over a month to complete. Watch Vale's drawing come to life in the time-lapse video above, and view images of his illustration after the break.

Witness the urban life of five stunning metropolises through the lens of Rob Whitworth with these "Vimeo Staff Pick" hyperlapse videos. From the unexplored urban life of the North Korean capital Pyongyang to the towering skyline of Dubai, each video explores an incredible sequence of daily living in cities across the planet. See more, including video from Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai, after the break.

ArchDaily has teamed up with Building Pictures, Filipa Figueira and Tiago Vieira to feature weekly episodes of their video series “Arquitectura à Moda do Porto,” which highlights Porto’s most significant buildings over the last two decades.

The series launched in 2013 and is composed of 10 episodes, each focusing on a different theme: light, stairs, balconies, nature, textures, doors, windows, skylights, pavements and structures.

Last week we featured the series’ sixth episode about Porto’s doors, and now we present Episode 7 – Windows. Read the producers’ description of the latest episode after the break.

We have teamed up with Building Pictures, Filipa Figueira and Tiago Vieira to feature weekly episodes of their video series “Arquitectura à Moda do Porto,” which highlights Porto’s most significant buildings over the last two decades.

The series launched in 2013 and is comprised of 10 episodes, each focusing on a different theme: light, stairs, balconies, nature, textures, doors, windows, skylights, pavements and structures.

Last week we featured the series’ third episode about Porto’s balconies, and now we present Episode 4 – Nature. Read the producers’ description of Episode 4 after the break.

We teamed up with Building Pictures, Filipa Figueira and Tiago Vieira to feature weekly episodes of their video series “Arquitectura à Moda do Porto,” which highlights Porto’s most significant buildings over the last 20 years.

The series is comprised of 10 episodes, each focusing on a different theme: light, stairs, balconies, nature, textures, doors, windows, skylights, pavements and structures.

Last week we presented the series’ second episode on the stairs of Porto, and now we present Episode 3 – Balconies. Read the producers’ description of the video after the break.

The second episode in "Classic Japan" features the 1966 Kyoto International Conference Center by Sachio Otani. The site of the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, Otani's waterfront conference center unfurls onto nearby Lake Takaragaike via a series of concrete pathways that offset the centre's Brutalist weight. Filmed and edited by Vincent Hecht, a French architect and film maker currently living in Tokyo, the series focuses on Japanese architecture from the 1950s to the 80s.

Before working on the conference center, Otani had previously worked in the office of Kenzo Tange, whose Yoyogi National Gymnasium was featured in the first episode of the "Classic Japan" series.

In this installment of the Louisiana Channel, world-renowned architect Steven Holl discusses his philosophy on organic architecture and its ability to generate a specific experience. "I believe architecture is an art, that it changes peoples' lives, and I think that's what architecture has the potential to do," Holl remarks.

If buildings could talk, what would they say about us? Cathedrals of Culture, a six part collection of films recently premiered at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, "offers six startling responses to this question". The project, filmed entirely in 3D, allows "six iconic and very different buildings to speak for themselves, examining human life from the unblinking perspective of a manmade structure".

Based in Bordeaux and Bayonne, architecture studio Leibar&Seigneurin has created a new video to introduce their social housing project in Anglet. Last week we brought you their video on their project in Bordeaux in which they revealed the ways in which film can represent the fabric of architecture better than photography alone. In this video, they discuss the ways in which the white monolithic form of their project in Anglet takes on a sculptural quality, with various elements animating the façade and looking out onto a courtyard.

Based in Bordeaux and Bayonne, architecture studio Leibar&Seigneurin created a video to introduce their newest social housing project in Bordeaux. They believe that film can represent the fabric of architecture better than photography alone because it captures life and the passage of time. Throughout the video, they discuss their conceptual approach to dealing with this building’s context.