Videos

In this video by the AIA, Marlon Blackwell, one of Arkansas’ foremost architects, speaks on the importance of small projects in an architect's career. “I only really worked on small projects at the beginning…that was doing everything…The scale of the site, the scale of the model, the scale of the hand…the beauty of the small project is that you can work at all of those many scales," says Blackwell. “The smaller projects are the beginning of the development of a language in architecture. I see it not as a benign or banal thing but as the beginning of taking yourself from where you are to where you want to be.”

Swiss filmmaker Alexandre Favre has explored his passion for architecture with the creation of this film about Mies van der Rohe. Starting with the German Pavilion replica, Favre began a journey that would lead him to a number of Mies' most notable works, filming them with equipment that was contemporary at the time of each project's fruition. Inspired by the architect's "less is more" motto, Favre aimed to capture the essence of Mies' architecture by revealing the projects in a simple format taken from the human perspective.

Kulapat Yantrasast is one of the founding partners and current Creative Director of wHY (Workshop Hakomori Yantrasast): a multi-disciplinary firm that works with designed objects, architecture and ideas. Yantrasast values humanist design, focusing on the way architecture directly relates to its human inhabitants. The firm has a diverse portfolio, with much of their work focusing on the relationship of public spaces to the city. They have been shortlisted to revitalize Los Angeles’ oldest park, selected to design the performance spaces for Chicago’s re-designed Jackson Park, and designed and built the “Art Bridge” – a cultural piece of infrastructure – over the Los Angeles river.

Grace Farms by SANAA perfectly illustrates the firm’s sinuous, elegant style, combining their understanding of glass and structure to create spaces so fluid that they’re hard to believe from just a photo. A new time lapse by Work Zone Cam shows the construction of this project in HD, capturing a period between September 2013 and October 2015. Work Zone Cam worked with Project Manager, Paratus Group, to document Grace Farms’ construction, including its central piece “The River”: a ribbon-like roof that blends seamlessly with the landscape. Watch the entire construction of the project in just 180 seconds after the break.

The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, more commonly known simply as the Sagrada Família, has been under construction in Barcelona since 1882, but now completion of the church is finally in sight. As this video from the Basilica’s YouTube page illustrates, the six final towers are set to be completed by 2026, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the death of Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect who devoted much of his life to the design and construction of the building. These six towers, representing the Virgin Mary, the four evangelists, and Jesus Christ, will be the last and tallest of 18 spires on the church, and will make the Sagrada Família the tallest church building in the world.

AMO has released the 16th edition of Prada Real Fantasies - a conceptual reinterpretation of the 2016 Spring/Summer Prada collection.

"AMO graphically reinterprets the Indefinite Hangar as a synthetic sunset fixed within a 3 dimensional blank space. The abstract hangar is populated with geometric objects and furniture. Characters move through a neutral scene between the undefined and distilled fragments of daily life. The horizon and scale constantly shifts, manipulating the frame and disrupting a linear sequence: an artificial landscape where fiction and collection collide," says the OMA research studio.

Art director and motion designer Sergej Hein has created an animated parody on the monotony of Soviet high-rise housing in Berlin.

The former Czechoslovakia is home to more Cold War-era prefabricated housing blocks, locally referred to as “panelaks,” than anywhere else in the former Soviet bloc. After the fall of communism, many called for the demolition of the panelaks, seen as unwanted reminders of a difficult history. In Bratislava alone, 130,000 people live in panelaks; destroying and replacing that much housing would have been prohibitively expensive, but Slovakian architecture firm GutGut had a different idea.

As this video shows, GutGut instead renovated and reconfigured a dilapidated tower block, updating the appearance, inserting communal spaces on the ground floor, providing a variety of apartment types, and adding balconies for many of the new apartments. The rehabilitated building removes the stigma of a previously undesirable building, and provides more varied housing options for residents. But more than just bringing the style of the building up to date, GutGut shows that even the most difficult outdated structures can be updated to meet modern needs.

In his TED Talk filmed at TEDGlobal London in September 2015, Ole Scheeren eschews what he describes as the “detrimental straightjacket” of the modernist mantra “form follows function” in favor a phrase he attributes to Bernard Tschumi, “form follows fiction.” While Tschumi was referencing how cultural artifacts, such as literature, impact architecture, Scheeren reinterprets the phrase, imagining the stories of building users in order to inform the design process. Scheeren recounts, for example, how the daily activities of CCTV employees, the lifestyles of residents of a Singapore housing block, or the traditional tools of Thai fishermen have informed his various designs for OMA and Büro Ole Scheeren.

Of course, this “fiction” that Scheeren describes, these stories, are not really fictions at all, but the real experiences of the people who live or work in his buildings. In that sense, the fiction that drives his forms is really just another type of function, albeit a more human approach to function. Nevertheless, for Scheeren the stories of these designs goes beyond just the users, also encompassing the stories of the hundreds of people it takes to make such buildings a reality, and even how architecture can become a character in the narratives of our own lives.

Despite often designing homes larger than 15,000 square feet for their clients, Houston-based design team Mark Schatz and Anne Eamon have designed and built a 980 square-foot house for their family of four. The couple designed and built the home largely on their own, out of leftover materials collected from projects their firm has worked on over the past few years.

Doing architecture is listening. - Norman Foster

Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, Diébédo Francis Kéré and three other great architects come together in this Louisiana Channel video to share their thoughts on how to design for different cultures. For most of them, understanding context, collaborating with locals and using architecture to address larger social issues are what makes global architecture a success.

Louis Becker, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and Kunlé Adeyemi also share their insights in the video above - "Bridging Cultures in a Global World."

As part of OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas' sixth interview with Charlie Rose, the Rotterdam-based Architect discusses why the Dutch port-city is his practice's base – and why he switched from journalism and scriptwriting to architecture. In the discussion, of which four snippets have been made available, Koolhaas also explains why he feels that smart technology has a "sinister dimension," and on how he—and his practice—have a tendency to "resist aesthetic."

Referencing architecture's intimate past with the arts, Steven Holl argues the importance of collaborating with other artists for the benefit of the profession alongside choreographer and dancer Jessica Lang. "If we don't intermix the arts and collaborate, we are going to close... The arts are going to fade out individually. We are stronger together."

Watch the Spirit of Space video above to learn more about Holl and Lang's collaboration - Dance with Architecture - that uses dance to explore the four types of architecture: "under the ground, in the ground, on the ground, and over the ground."

A new short film, made by Jeremy Riggall for Alain de Botton's School of Life, gives insight into the working day of Tamiraa – a Civil Engineer working in Mongolia's burgeoning capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Aside from following Tamiraa's daily responsibilities, the film also touches upon issues related to working in a rapidly growing city with an urgent demand for better educational and healthcare provision, alongside new housing and its supporting infrastructure.

From the Oscar-winning production and animation studio Mikrofilm AS, this short film illustrates the unconventional ways families of modernist architects celebrate Christmas. We all know that the way we stack presents must be intentional; and what better building to model your gingerbread house after than Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum?

In this wide-ranging video, drone videographer Ian Wood captures the diversity of the built environment in Los Angeles, featuring architectural gems on equal footing with freeways and freight trains. The buildings and locations featured in the video span over a century of architectural history in LA, and cover the region’s vast geography, including such icons as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, Cesar Pelli’s Pacific Design Center, Eric Owen Moss’ Stealth building, and Morphosis’ recently completed Emerson College Los Angeles.

But what truly sets this video apart is how it highlights the many murals spread throughout the city. Often utilizing otherwise blank facades facing parking lots and alleys, these murals are nonetheless an integral part of LA’s urban fabric, as illustrated in this video. Sadly though, as Wood notes on the video description, there were many more murals that vanished before he was able to get them on video.

Last week marked the opening of Santiago Calatrava's Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to the its opening, ArchDaily sat down with Calatrava to learn more about the museum's design and how the project's fruition resulted in the removal of an elevated highway that once isolated the city from the harbor.

"If you only think in architectural terms, only architecture will come out." - Wolf Prix

Inspired by space suits, Formula One circuits, and many other "mind expanding machines," Wolf D. Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au explains the thought process that went behind their design of the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, France. With spiraling ramps and bridges throughout, the museum allows visitors to explore the space "freely," despite the constraints of gravity, and, in a sense, "conquer space." Read on for Spirit of Space's full interview with Prix.