Actualités

"How accidental our existences are, how full of influence by circumstance." Abramorama has revealed the new 2022 official trailer for My Architect, a documentary film from 2003 that is getting a re-release this year. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, after premiering at film festivals in 2003. My Architect is getting a restoration re-release this year, 19 years later, just one year shy of its 20th anniversary. Director Nathaniel Kahn searches to understand the complexities of his father, the renowned architect Louis Kahn, who died bankrupt and alone in 1974. The film has interviews with many architects including B.V. Doshi, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Shamsul Wares, I.M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, and Anne Tyng. In the film, Kahn visits all of his father's buildings including The Yale Center for British Art, The Salk Institute, Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. This looks like a fascinating story that is about...

A few good docs always emerge from Tribeca. Yet emerging from any film festival with strong reviews and a distribution deal doesn’t mean that anyone will see the film. Tribeca, with its ear to the ground, recognized that other festivals didn't take the sports documentary – or jockumentary--seriously. With support from Espn and others Tribeca has seized the opportunity. The sports docs are now at the core of the Tribeca program. “Lenny Cooke” is one of them. This much-awaited doc by the Safdie brothers (nephews of the Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie) takes us to a familiar story. But this specific sad journey from potential to present will get under your skin. Cooke, a prodigiously promising kid from New York who came up with skills comparable to those of LeBron James or Carmelo Anthony (two of the top NBA players today) is now overweight and way over the hill. He looks...

Everyone’s favorite Canadian cross-dressing comedy troupe is back with tonight’s premiere of their eight-part murder-mystery miniseries The Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town (IFC, 10 p.m. Et). It’s got everything fans of Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley, and Scott Thompson want, as evidenced by the photo above. They each play multiple characters, but that’s McKinney as Death, who arrives in Shuckton, Ontario on a Greyhound bus and rides around on a bone-covered Mustang bike; McCulloch as Ricky, a 600 lb. shamed ex-hockey star who has been in his house since he lost...

Michael Graves and Moshe Safdie try out some (classy) sin-city indulgences on one of the most uptight places around.

After a 45-year ban on casinos, Singapore is getting back into the gambling business by rolling the dice on a couple starchitects. Their mission: Keep sin classy.

So we have one casino from Moshe Safdie, the Israeli-born Boston architect most famous for designing the cubist-like Habitat 67 housing complex in Montreal and another from Michael Graves, whom you might recall from his days making teakettles for Target and, to a lesser extent, his bad (really bad) '80s buildings.

What they're creating aren't just casinos; they're "resorts." They're costing billions to build, and they include all sorts of un-casino-like flourishes, from a marine-life park and a luxury hostelry, to high-art installations and, hilariously, jogging paths. All of which must go a long way toward keeping visitors amused and, moreover, convincing cane-wielding Singapore...

Luminous A starchitect-in-the-making brings his love of light--and a social conscience--to London, Moscow, and the National Mall in D.C. By Jeff Chu

Let's say we gathered the world's top architects and played a game of "Which of these is not like the others?" David Adjaye, one of the newest members of that club, would stand out. Because at 43 years old, he is so young.

Architecture today is an old man's field. It is not like literature or film or technology, where twenty- and thirty-somethings regularly burst into the elite. You do your time. You build a few small things, then bigger ones. If you're lucky, when everyone else is ready for Aarp membership, you reach the top of the field and stay there until you die. The precocious Herzog and de Meuron are 59. Frank Gehry is 80. When Thom Mayne -- who's still being called a rising star -- won...

It's a plain truth that national museums in the U.S. have been humdrum at best, composed mainly of bricks and compromises. But if the six shortlisted designs for Washington, D.C.'s new National Museum of African-American History & Culture are any indication, things are changing. Though in the works since 2001, the museum has moved forward at a trickling pace. But finally, the shortlisted designs are on display through Friday at the Smithsonian. The architects themselves don't cluster into any identifiable trend. They include designs led by heavyweights of different stripes: Antoine Predock, Pei Cobb Fried, David Adajye, Foster+Partners, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Moshe Safdie. The winner will be announced in April, and construction will begin in 2012 with a finish date in 2015. Here's a lowdown on the finalists:

Antoine Predock, based in New Mexico and famous for a decidedly southwestern vibe in his buildings, collaborated with Moody Nolan, on...