Videos

Responding to rising sea level predictions and elevated threats of coasting flooding, Perkins + Will design principle Brian Healy has proposed a replicable, floating residential community for Boston’s harbor: Floatyard. In this TEDx, Healy argues that not only would this radical proposal protect coastal housing investments, it could reengage Charlestown’s industrial harbor. In addition to this, Floatyard's architecture would incorporate solar energy and rainwater harvesting on its roof, as well as capitalize tidal energy from the mooring columns which anchor it.

An inspiring little video from the folks at Virginia Tech that will make you want to get your designer hands dirty - today. The video follows the third-years of 2013 as they build their final project: a bridge. As the co-founder of the lab, Kieth Zawistowski, eloquently says at the video's end, "It doesn't really matter if you ever want to actually build something yourself again, what's important, in this case, is that you've seen the entirety of the process, from conception to realization." If you want to see more from design/buildLAB, check out the project completed by last year's students (which features in the last few minutes of the video): Masonic Ampitheatre.

What was once a symbol of Caracas' bright financial future is now the world’s tallest slum: Venezuela's Tower of David. Squatters took over this unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, after its construction was stopped due to a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake, David Brillembourg. 

Now, as the government is grappling with a citywide housing shortage, many residents have spent most of their life within the walls of David. And despite the tower’s reputation as being a hotbed of crime, residents have managed to build a self-sustaining community complete with a communal electrical grid and aqueduct water system.

A couple of months ago we told you about reSITE Conference 2013, the largest event of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. During the conference, the reSITE dPAV Competition Workshop also took place. Led by Cecil Balmond, formerly of Arup Engineers and currently leading Balmond Studio in London, and Tyson Hosmer, Lead Designer, Balmond Studio, dPAV: 2.5 Days in Prague competition workshop was a 2.5 days intensive and collaborative investigation to compete to design the future reSITE pavilion to be used in urban design festivals around Central and Eastern Europe.

Kyoto-based architects Kentaro Takeguchi and Asako Yamamoto of Alphaville Architects have completed a small guest house for tourists visiting the sacred Koyasan (Mt. Koya) in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan. The 96 m2 (1,033 ft2) building contains bedrooms, capsule-style dormitory rooms, a bar, and lounge. Between the bar, hallway, and lounge, 2 x 4 and 2 x 6 timber frames are exposed inside at varying intervals to act as partitions

Spirit of Space has shared with us their most recent collaboration with Phil Enquist of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Art in the City. Pairing powerful quotes with imagery from the Chicago’s most prominent works, the film "expresses the vitality and vibrance that public art can bring to the urban environment by experientially including the viewer in the making of place.” As Spirit of Space describes, “The art is a reflection of the City, the art becomes a part of the City, the art is instrumental in making the City.”

Disappointed that most architecture is built for the privileged, rather than society, Shigeru Ban has dedicated much of his career to building affordable, livable and safe emergency shelters for post-disaster areas. As described by TED:

Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda, or Japan. Yet equally often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose.

David Gianotten, the director of OMA Asia, designs highly modern buildings across the continent but is still drawn to traditional temples for inspiration. Enjoy this great video he did with Crane.tv.

This Parisian ghost town in Tianducheng, China has become the archetype of China's architectural copycat culture. Brought to light by the folks at The Atlantic Cities, this short video by German filmmaker Caspar Stracke accounts for an average day in this faux-Parisian development where less than 10,000 residents call home.

You asked, an expert Arup engineer has answered! 

In the first of our video series with Arup, structural engineer Matt Clark addresses ArchDaily reader Hannah Worthington's inquiry, submitted via our facebook page: "How do you work out the structural capacity of a tree branch to build a tree house?"

Dying to get your question answered in the next "Ask Arup" video? Ask away in the comments below.

With the help of crowdfunding, Luke Shepard journeyed with a friend through 36 cities in 21 countries over the course of three months to capture over 20,000 images of some of Europe’s greatest structures. The end product resulted in a four-minute film entitled Nightvision, which aims to inspire appreciation for the "brilliance and diversity of architecture found across Europe".

The list of buildings featured in this film can be found on Shepard's site here.

Since its opening in 2001, the ever inspiring Jewish Museum in Berlin has experienced the addition of the Studio Daniel Libeskind designed Glass Courtyard in 2007, and The Academy which was recently completed and opened in 2013. With the museum as the focus and inspiration driving these two recent additions, Spirit of Space took this opportunity to provide us with another look at this emotionally moving masterpiece. From the very beginning, Libeskind believed the extension to the museum was about establishing and securing an identity within Berlin, which was lost during WWII. In cinematic form, their film attempts to express the uneasy sequential essence of Libeskind’s work.

Spanish architecture photographer Miguel de Guzmán has stepped into video, a new dimension of architectural representation, as we saw a few weeks ago with his video for the Espinar House.

The Jewish Museum is just as emotionally moving and utterly disorienting today as it was when it first opened. Taking a fresh reflective look, Spirit of Space has produced a short film capturing moments of this singular architectural experience. The soundscape is jarring. Shots linger with trepidation. Perceptions waver with marks of appearance and disappearance. And in cinematic form, the film attempts to express the uneasy sequential essence of Daniel Libeskind’s work.

At a lecture he delivered in April this year at the 4th Holcim Forum 2013 in Mumbai, Pritzker Jury member and Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena approached sustainability from an unconventional angle. The key to achieving the "Economy of Sustainable Construction" (the title of this year's Holcim Forum), Aravena claims, requires two things: "in this generation, more psychiatrists; in the next generations, more breasts."

Alix Bossard shares this must-watch video that outlines Le Corbusier's five revolutionary principles of modern architecture. Using gorgeous motion design, the video briefly introduces us to everything from le Modulor to Villa Savoye and Les Cités Radieuses. Enjoy this two-minute recap of the career of one this century's most influential architects.

Urban explorer The Unknown Cameraman takes us inside an abandoned Futuro House, one of the roughly hundred that were constructed in the 1960s/1970s. Shot around "various undisclosed locations in New Jersey" the video shows the futuristic saucer-shaped prefabricated dwelling made of fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic. Matti Suuronen, the Finn who conceived of the hatched house, thought of it as the ideal ski cabin (that could be plopped down and easily removed, regardless of the roughness of a given terrain).

Legendary American architect Steven Holl has collaborated again with Spirit of Space to produce two short videos on the recently completed Campbell Sports Center in New York City. While always compelling to hear an architect discuss a project, these videos integrate the architect's narration with different dynamic shots of the building's detail and context, thus truly immersing the viewer in the project.

The first video (above) features Steven Holl and senior partner Chris McVoy explaining the project's inspiration, design concept and program; simultaneously, the filmmakers take us into the space and show how the new athletic facility is being used by the student athletes. The second, shorter, video (after the break) shows the building in the city, revealing the fascinatingly complex relationship between the passing subway cars, the field hockey players, the movement of shadows and the building itself.

See the second video, after the break...