Videos

Filmed at the Vertou Cultural Center, designed by Atelier Fernandez & Serres, this video by filmmaker Lucas Bacle challenges the traditional conventions of cinematography, employing architectural drawings to provide context for the actions of the film’s protagonist. The cultural center itself becomes a central character to the short film, as Bacle layers video on top of orthographics, highlighting the character's relationship in space to the plans and sections.

In 2014, Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni won the Syria category of the UN Habitat Mass Housing Competition for a housing scheme she developed for the city of Homs, her hometown. Now over two years later, Thames and Hudson has published her book Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria. Throughout all of these events, al-Sabouni has remained in Syria. As the Guardian puts it: “As bombs fell around her, Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni stayed in Homs throughout the civil war, making plans to build hope from carnage.”

In this TEDSummit video, Al-Sabouni argues “that while architecture is not the axis around which all of human life rotates... it has the power to... direct human activity” She believes that the Old Islamic cities of Syria were once harmonious urban entities which advocated for co-habitation and tolerance through their intertwining. However, she posits that over the last century, beginning with French colonization, the Ancient towns were seen as un-modern and were gradually “improved” with elements of modernity: “brutal unfinished concrete blocks, aesthetic devastation and divisive communities that zoned communities by class, creed, or affluence.” This urban condition, she argues, is what created the conditions for the uprising-turned-civil war.

In this video, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, the curators of the German Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale discuss their theme of “Making Heimat, Arrival Country.” The exhibition explores the current influx of refugee communities occurring in Germany, and how architecture can be used to improve the “arrival cities” where immigrants tend to settle.

In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, Ali Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen, curators of the Kuwait Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, discuss the architectural identity and potential of Kuwait and the Middle East region as a whole. The duo explain how they approached the pavilion design by asking themselves the question: “How do we imagine a conversation between the different countries of the Gulf?”

Videos

At this year's reSITE conference in Prague, speakers attended from around the globe to present differing perspectives on the challenges of migration, with topics of interest ranging from economics, to city planning to architecture. But as revealed by the following presentations, migration is a topic that requires interrogation on a number of different scales and in a number of different contexts: from the global economic focus offered by Saskia Sassen in her opening keynote lecture, to the focused challenges of designing micro-apartments shown by Mimi Hoang of nArchitects; and even to the unusual case presented by Krister Lindstedt of White Arkitekter, when a migration is undertaken not by individual people but by a whole town at once.

Photographer and filmmaker Joe Capra, known for Scientifantastic, filmed and produced the video '10328x7760 - The 10K Demo', which is exactly what the title implies, a timelapse video resolution in 10K of the city of Rio de Janeiro. For those who are not familiar with the technical specifications, this resolution is about 10 times higher than the traditional Full HD (1920 x 1080px), which is the maximum resolution of most monitors sold today.

In this video entitled Building Between, Marlon Blackwell advocates for a kind of regionalism which isn’t as divisive as “regionalism.” As a 24-year resident of Arkansas, he recalls his work and process in a place which he states is both “an environment of natural beauty and a place of real constructed ugliness”—showing the nuanced and self-critical awareness of place beyond the utopian glorification of genius loci which earlier this year earned him the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.

In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, Frédéric Bonnet of Obras Architecture and Grichka Martinetti of PNG, curators of the French contribution to the 2016 Venice Biennale, discuss their commitment to celebrating meaningful architecture in various contexts, and the ways in which this passion was translated into their exhibition. The duo explains the concepts driving the exhibition design, including their choice to exhibit small-scale work from throughout France rather than focusing on the large, high-profile architecture found in the major cities.

After training at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Israel and moving to New York in 2000, Eran Chen founded ODA New York, a boutique architectural firm based in NYC. Chen has quickly become a recognized name associated with creating buildings that are not only innovative but also ecologically responsible. ODA has participated in high profile projects such as the "super-skinny and super-tall" Manhattan Tower and "a city within a city" in Brooklyn.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group has released a new animation of “The Shed” (previously known as “The Culture Shed”), a convertible cultural center designed for New York City’s Hudson Yards development overlooking The High Line. When complete, the building will contain 170,000 square feet of exhibition space for temporary installations, concerts, performances and other cultural productions. Watch in the video as The Shed grows out of its partnering residential skyscraper, also designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group, and transforms to serve various program types.

A part of Phase 1 of the Hudson Yards project, construction on The Shed began in mid-2015 and is scheduled to be completed in 2019. The venue will serve as the new home of several high profile events, including New York Fashion Week.

Thanks to a new robot named Hadrian X, we made soon be able to construct an entire brick house in just 2 days. Developed by the appropriately named Australian firm Fastbrick Robotics, the giant truck-mounted robot has the ability to lay up to 1,000 bricks an hour. Its innovation comes via the machine’s 30-meter telescopic boom, which allows the base to remain in a single position throughout the brick-laying process.

Videos

In two lectures delivered by Bart Lootsma, Professor and Head of Institute for Architectural Theory and History at the University of Innsbruck, the 2016 Venice Biennale—Reporting From the Front—is dissected, unpicked and evaluated through the national participations (pavilions) and Alejandro Aravena's central exhibitions. Lootsma, who has broadcast the lectures as publicly available resources on architecturaltheory.eu, is the co-curator of the 2016 Pavilion of Montenegro.

The Spaces has recently released a short film in which architect David Adjaye and his musician brother Peter Adjaye discuss their upcoming vinyl collaboration, which fuses music and architecture together to represent a multi-sensory experience.

In the film, the Adjaye brothers delve into several topics, like explaining their inspirations, David’s early ambitions as a DJ, and their upcoming soundtrack for the soon-to-be-opened National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

In a recent interview presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, architect Christian Kerez and curator Sandra Oehy speak about Incidental Space, their exhibition for the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini at the 2016 Venice Biennale.

Kerez explains, “what we tried to do for this year’s Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is to really make a building, actually—to build a space, to offer an experience of architecture. Basically, a space at the Biennale doesn’t have to be very functional. You don’t have to live there; you don’t have to work there. It’s really about experience. This is also about the question, how much can you imagine? How can you create a space with the utmost architectonical complexity?”

In this interview, curator Jingyu Liang of Approach Architecture Studio discusses the concept behind "Daily Design, Daily Tao – Back to the Ignored Front," the theme of the Chinese Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Responding to 2016 Biennale director Alejandro Aravena's overall theme of "Reporting From the Front," the pavilion takes an introspective look at China's own architectural front, and the impact that the country's ongoing development boom has had on Chinese architecture.

In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon—curators of the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale—explain why the United States' contribution to the 2016 Venice Biennale has brought together "visionary" American architectural practices to speculatively address the future of the city of Detroit. They argue that these projects have "far-reaching applications for cities around the world."

From the Cradle of Civilization in ancient Mesopotamia to the modern urban explosion in China, cities are among the most obvious and dramatic evidence of human existence. In a recent paper published in Scientific Data, a team led by Yale University researcher Meredith Reba mapped the emergence of cities between 3,700 BC and 2,000 AD based on when their populations were first recorded in historical accounts.

Taking the data from this study, Max Galka of Metrocosm has produced this fascinating animation showing the history of cities worldwide. "Most datasets available go back only a few years or decades at most. This is the first one I've seen that covers 6 millennia," Galka told CityLab. "I'm a big fan of history, so after reading the study, I thought it would be interesting to visualize the data and see if it offers some perspective." The steady flow of time may seem a little slow at first, but stick with it through the early BC years and the shifts in urban development start to get intriguing. And—spoiler alert—buckle up as you approach the 20th century.

In this interview, presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, Jack Self—co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale—reveals how the frontline of architecture in Britain today is not just a housing crisis, but "a crisis of the home." In provocatively presenting "the banal," Self reveals why the British participation at the 2016 Venice Biennale proposes five new models for domestic life, each curated through time of domestic occupancy, alongside how it seeks to address the ways in which we might live in the future.