Architecture

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Read More »

Visionary documentary that contrasts the conditions of life in small towns and in the industrialized cities, starting with a brief portrait of pre-industrial United States, then moving into the modern chaotic, industrial and commercial city to reflect on the effects of this environment on family life and the raising of children, and finally proposing a return to a simpler life, in an idyllic “new city” in Maryland, constructed as a New Deal project, to promote proper upbringing of children, as well as a stable family life.Read More »

From the IMDB:
26 Bathrooms is a witty, light little film that must be seen by those who appreciate Greenaway’s darker, more allegorical works. Simultaneously satiric and celebratory, the lighter side of his humanism washes through this quirky quasi-documentary of our most fundamental bodily needs and the spaces we create to fulfil them.Read More »

“Heinz Emigholz opens his latest, Slaughterhouses of Modernity, with a voice. This would have normally been shocking as Emigholz’s austere “Photography and Beyond” series of films lack any sort of voiceover, preferring the subjects (always architecture) to do the talking themselves. Oftentimes, this means an overview of an architect’s career (Perret in France and Algeria or Maillart’s Bridges) or an attempt to compare and contrast the details of certain works (Two Museums or Two Basilicas). Read More »

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In stark contrast to the colourful, “swinging” imagery of 1960’s London we are all too familiar with, The London Nobody Knows, displays the dying, decaying underbelly of old Victorian values, practices and architecture. We are shown proto-delboy’s hawking goods in now-dead street markets. Bizarre buskers and street performers act out their defunct acts to grey, bewildered onlookers. Old forgotten men pay 6 shillings a week for bed and breakfast in Salvation Army hostels, the memories of the war lingering in their haggard faces.Read More »

A man and his wife decide they can afford to have a house in the country built to their specifications. It’s a lot more trouble than they think.Read More »

Plot: Doug Roberts, Architect, returns from a long vacation to find work nearly completed on his skyscraper. He goes to the party that night concerned he’s found that his wiring specifications have not been followed and that the building continues to develop short circuits. When the fire begins, Michael O’Halleran is the chief on duty as a series of daring rescues punctuate the terror of a building too tall to have a fire successfully fought from the ground.Read More »

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KOCHUU is a visually stunning film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition, and its impact on the Nordic building tradition. Winding its way through visions of the future and traditional concepts, nature and concrete, gardens and high-tech spaces, the film explains how contemporary Japanese architects strive to unite the ways of modern man with the old philosophies in astounding constructions. KOCHUU, which translates as “in the jar,” refers to the Japanese tradition of constructing small, enclosed physical spaces, which create the impression of a separate universe. The film illustrates key components of traditional Japanese architecture, such as reducing the distinction between outdoors and indoors, disrupting the symmetrical, building with wooden posts and beams rather than with walls, modular construction techniques, and its symbiotic relationship with water…Read More »

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It’s not unusual for pre-production publicity on a new film to revolve around the star or the director but it’s particularly rare when it focuses on a construction site. In the case of the glossy 1960 soap opera, Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine, the real star of the movie was the cliff top Bel Air home that was constructed especially for the film by architect Carl Anderson and art director Ross Bellah. Central to the storyline, the house with the ocean view is the vision of architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) who is building it for a successful novelist, Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), who wants something different and unique. In the course of construction, Coe, who is bored with his marriage to Eve (Barbara Rush), meets and ardently pursues Maggie Gault (Kim Novak), a sexy, blonde housewife he first encounters at his son’s elementary school when they are dropping off their children.Read More »