Videos

Recently voted the UK’s ugliest tower, The Barbican Tower is one of the three residential towers of the Barbican Estate, built between 1965 and 1976 in London. Along with fourteen apartment blocks, the Barbican Estate contains 2014 flats, connected by a labyrinth of floating passageways and landscaped gardens.

The history of Johannesburg's Ponte City Apartments is a provocative one: built in 1975 and designed by Manfred Hermer as the height of luxurious (white-only) living in South Africa, the continent's tallest residential building soon became a notorious vertical slum, filled with crime and poverty, its signature hollow core re-purposed as a trash dump and a suicide drop.

MASS has just released the third video in their Beyond the Building series, which examines how architecture and design can positively impact our world, beyond buildings (check out the first video here and the second here). The latest - "Ilima: Beyond Sustainability" - explores MASS's collaboration with the African Wildlife Foundation as well as local masons to build a primary school in the rural Congolese village of Ilima, where, due to its remote location, practically all materials must be sourced locally.

With an emphasis on collaborative environments, relaxing atmospheres, and quirky branding, it's always interesting to take a peek into the offices of tech companies, often found in the sprawling, multi-colored campuses of Silicon Valley. But how does this particular brand of interior design transfer to the more cramped spaces of a Manhattan office block? This video by Internet Week NY takes us behind the scenes at Tumblr, About.com and Fueled Collective to find out.

Jeffrey Durkin, director of Breadtruck Films, has shared with us this insightful short film on Jonathan Segal’s new concrete and glass house in La Jolla: The Cresta. According to Durkin, “The film explores the relationship between nature and architecture, father and son, and how clean minimal design can save us from the suburbs.”

In this TED Talk, Aga Khan Award-winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré explains how to build a community with clay. With his firm Kéré Architecture, the Burkina Faso native has achieved international renown by using local building materials and techniques to engage and improve local expertise. Watch as explains how he applied his personal success to benefit the small African village he grew up in.

Our friends at Arbuckle Industries has shared this short clip that takes you inside Foster + Partners' Yale School of Management. Completed earlier this year, the new school unites Yale’s faculty departments at the Edward P. Evans Hall with world-class teaching facilities and collaborative social spaces. This, as the architects described, brings a new level of transparency to education, abandoning traditionally closed-off courtyard buildings for an open design that embraces the campus community. More stunning images and information on the project can be found here.

In this TED talk, architect and urbanist Teddy Cruz urges us to rethink urban growth. Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana, Cruz denounces the “stupid” and consumption-driven ways in which our cities have been expanding and declares that the future depends on the reorganization of social economic relations.

American film director Wes Anderson shares something in common with architects: a love for symmetry. Serving as proof, this kogonada produced video reveals Anderson’s masterful use of symmetry by compiling perfectly centered scenes from his many works.

ArchDaily has teamed up with Portugal's Canal 180 to bring you their series I LIKE. Check out episode 3, I LIKE Purple. The video features SO-IL's Flockr Pavilion, raumlabor's SOFT SOLUTION and two other purple-hued spatial interventions.

I LIKE is an original series on architecture and spatial intervention, developed in a collaboration between Canal 180 and LIKEarchitects atelier. Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto have created a chromatic experiment and spatial exercise—organized by color—that reveals some of the most amazing architectural interventions in the world.

Next week ArchDaily will premier the fourth installment of I LIKE. Stay tuned!

In Residence: Fernando Romero on Nowness.com

NOWNESS has released the latest in their "In Residence" series, a collection of short videos that interview designers in their homes. This time, internationally renowned Mexican Architect Fernando Romero presents his Mexico City villa, designed by Francisco Artias in 1955, which he describes as "the ultimate modernity dream come true."

ArchDaily has teamed up with Portugal's Canal 180 to bring you their series I LIKE. Check out episode 2, I LIKE Pink. The video features UNStudio's Holiday Home, Périphériques architectes' Pink Ghost and two other pink-hued installations.

I LIKE is an original series on architecture and spatial intervention, developed in a collaboration between Canal 180 and LIKEarchitects atelier. Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto have created a chromatic experiment and spatial exercise—organized by color—that reveals some of the most amazing architectural interventions in the world.

Next week ArchDaily will premier the third installment of I LIKE. Stay tuned!

Steven Holl has, again, teamed up with Spirit of Space to produce two short films on the recently completed Sifang Art Museum. In the first video (above) Holl explains the project’s inspiration - the mysteries of parallel perspective seen in early Chinese paintings - and how the design subtly distorts any concept of a vanishing point at the ground level yet contrasts this notion in the upper galleries by framing the distant view of Nanjing. In the second video (after the break), Spirit of Space allows you to experience this space by revealing it from all perspectives and scales.

See the second video, after the break…