Videos

This week's issue of The New York Times Magazine, the special New York issue with a theme of “New York Above 800 Feet,” takes a rather irreverent approach to the magazine’s design. Instead of being viewed in the traditional horizontal orientation, the periodical has been rotated 90 degrees and is meant to be viewed by turning the pages up. The long dimension, which is only 10.875 inches horizontally, becomes 17.875 inches vertically, and according to the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, “‘[It] remains absurdly short for our subject, but it is in keeping with the striving spirit that has given New York City its distinctive skyline: This is as tall as it is possible for our magazine to be."

One of the most significant buildings of the late modernist style, Le Corbusier’s Convent de la Tourette exemplifies the architect’s style and sensibilities in the latter end of his career. Built between 1956 and 1960 on a hillside near Lyon, France, the priory dominates the landscape, with its strict, geometric form.

Located in the arid desert of the San Rafael Valley, Arizona, Casa Caldera by DUST is a unique object in the vast landscape. In this video, architects Jesus Robles and Cade Hayes explain their project as viewers are taken on a vivid tour of the building and site. The camera moves through the desert, unveiling the house gradually, as one would truly experience it.

“One of the unique things about Casa Caldera is the experience of the approach,” Hayes says. “Two hours of travel are actually part of the experience of arriving. It isn’t until you are 20, 30 feet from the house that you get a good look.”

Plastique Fantastique's pneumatic structures were originally conceived in 1999 through necessity: "The fact that we used plastic was just due to the fact that we had no money," explains the firm's founder Marco Canevacci. "So, plastic was just the cheapest material we could imagine, and you can join parts very easily and you can create very simple architectures. By using a hot air blower, those architectures become warm places to stay." By using warm air to inflate the structures, their office became a landscape of heated pods in an otherwise cold space. However, through their continued experiments over almost two decades, Plastique Fantastique's pneumatic interventions have now come to make the case for an ephemeral, temporary, and whimsical architecture. Their work now continues a lineage started by the experimental utopian group Haus-Rucker-Co, whose own pneumatic structures of the 1960s were disposable, free-wheeling creations which both literally and metaphorically played with the boundaries of a world they saw as staid, rigid, and dull.

Last year, Plastique Fantastique was invited to the 180 Creative Camp held by Canal 180 in Abrantes, Portugal, where their giant, inhabitable Strawberry Ice Cream Cone took over a public place to provide a unique and fun spatial experience. To mark this event, Canal 180 produced a short film highlighting some key recent projects by the firm and documenting the construction of their latest work. Watch the video above, and read on to see more images of the installation in Abrantes.

+ 14

Frei Otto: Spanning the Future, a documentary focusing on the life and work of 2015 Pritzker Prize winner, Frei Otto, has finished production and will be screened at various venues during the course of 2016. The film features one of the last interviews Otto gave before his death, in addition to commentary from renowned architects and engineers, including Zaha Hadid and Jürgen Hennicke, on the importance of his work. In the film, Otto discusses the influences on his work and his approaches on form finding and the development of tensile structures.

The latest video in French architect and filmmaker Vincent Hecht’s Japanese Collection series features the Gifu Media Cosmos by Toyo Ito. The library/gallery features an undulating wooden ceiling and multiple large, suspended translucent funnels that define areas for different activities. A series of intermittent openings in the roof allows natural light into the space.

Zaha Hadid’s prolific, admired, and influential body of work led to hundreds of invitations to lecture around the world. Through her contemporaries’ heartfelt introductions, we can appreciate her groundbreaking architectural approach in a world which often appeared to be one step behind her ideas and enthusiasm.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)'s The Broad Museum has been slowly revitalizing its plot of downtown Los Angeles. In this new video by Chang Kyun Kim, The Broad is shown at an intimate human scale. Kim takes viewers on a journey through the space, following a class of elementary school children as they tour the museum.

The video opens with a shot of the museum from across the street. As the film slowly approaches the building, it focuses on small details, like other pedestrians, the line in front of the ticket booth and a worker adjusting a window detail from inside the museum. The video then moves through the building, viewing the art and the children interacting with it, at various distances and angles, mimicking the way one might experience the art in real life. As the children leave, the video closes with shots of The Broad, again from a distance, as if saying goodbye.

"In my practice I try to have fun doing architecture and designing architecture, and I try to play with architecture at the same time," explained Moon Hoon in ArchDaily's recent interview with the architect at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. "So sometimes my clients are very jealous—how come you're having fun getting paid—so I try to hide a little bit and say I'm a very serious guy, but most of the time I have great fun with architecture."

In this new video produced by Moon Hoon and Tomeny Kisilewicz, that sense of fun isn't being hidden much at all: the 5-minute film, which constructs a fantasy narrative around the existence of Moon Hoon's recently completed Wind House, is 50% surreal formal association, 50% sci-fi horror and 100% architectural fever dream.

Fabric is viewed as a material which is flat and two-dimensional and thus, until recent times, it has been used in architecture as a surface sheet. However the material has not been fully exploited.

Developed by four Masters students from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, FaBrick is a prototype for creating sturdy structures out of textile-based materials. So far consisting of a stool made from a fabric impregnated with cement and a chair made of a felt composite, the project aims to develop a "technique of designing fabric to become the new brick, the new concrete in the invention of architecture."

“Objects, colors, every artwork, every light, everything is linked to our history—everything is a perception of the meaning of our personal life, and also, of course, an aesthetical way of living.”  

In the latest installation of NOWNESS’ In Residence series, designer, entrepreneur and university lecturer Carlotta de Bevilacqua uses the context of her home to delve into ideas of what makes a home, the role design plays in her life, and how design requires risks, among other topics. Learn more about de Bevilacqua’s perspective by watching the video above.

Santiago Calatrava's long-awaited World Trade Center Oculus has officially opened. Thanks to EarthCam and the project's contractor Skanska USA, you can watch the $4 billion transportation hub take shape over the course of 42 months in just 65 seconds, from June 2011 to December 2014. For more, see what the critics have to say about the newly opened building here.

Videos

Buda... Pest... two characters separated by the Danube.
Day... night... two atmospheres separated by an invisible thread.
Budapest, "pearl of Danube", knows how to seduce at any hour, so why choose, when one can enjoy all its charms at the same time?

Exploring the role of lighting in architectural photography, French photographer Greg Florent created “Budapest Daynight” during a two-month stint in Hungary. Taking thousands of photographs, Florent created magical composite photos capturing architectural landmarks in-between the two opposing times of day. Accompanying his gallery of resulting work, he has also produced time-lapses of each of his subjects, illustrating the way that lighting affects the character of a building.

+ 5

In this short film, Monocle speaks to Penelope Evatt Seidler about the Modernist home she designed and built with her late husband, Harry Seidler, at Killara on Sydney's north shore. Far removed from the skyscrapers and residential towers for which the Seidler practice is known for, this house—completed in 1967—is a manifesto in early Modern and Bauhaus aesthetics that "are just as forward-thinking today as they were back then," built into the Australian landscape.

A new video by PONGOFILMS titled, “Archaeology of the Sea” captures footage of Italy's Riviera Romagnola during the winter. Using drones, the footage is captured from above, displaying closed aquatic recreation centres in "a place where it's difficult to understand what is waiting for the summer and what will remain lost." Boat rentals, cabanas and nightclubs laze into the frame, bereft of the buzz and activity that usually occupies them. See the full video, with accompanying soundtrack by Tame Impala, below.

In the latest video from the Louisiana Channel, six architects – Bjarke Ingels, Liz Diller, Daniel Libeskind, Robert A.M. Stern, Thom Mayne, and Craig Dykers – share what it’s like to build in New York. From the High Line to the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at Ground Zero, the architects each describe their approach to designing in the iconic city.

Because we are the architect acting as the developer, we eliminate the change orders, we eliminate the RFIs, we eliminate the job directives - there's basically no chocolate mess, we don't have anybody to answer to.

In this video from Breadtruck Films, San Diego architect Jonathan Segal speaks about how his business model of acting as a developer for his own architectural projects helped in the construction of his latest mixed-use project. The building - a seven-story concrete and glass structure which he named "Mr Robinson" thanks to its location at the corner of Robinson Avenue and Park Boulvard - was constructed in just 14 months as opposed to the 2 to 3 years that he would expect with the usual setup of architect, client and contractor (or "the bad triangle" as he calls it).

I think any man who really has faith in himself will be dubbed arrogant, I suppose. I think that's what happened to me. - Frank Lloyd Wright

In this video produced by Blank on Blank, Frank Lloyd Wright shares his thoughts on New York City, religious architecture, and being labeled arrogant. The interview was taken from a 1957 episode of The Mike Wallace Interview when Wright was 90 years old. Showing his trademark fieriness even at his advanced age, Wright claims that if he had another 15 years he would be able to change the whole of the United States for the better, dismissing the judgement of those with the audacity to call him arrogant. Watch the animated video above, and read on after the break for some of the interview's most quotable moments.