A video recording the state of the Montreal Biosphere designed by Buckminster Fuller at the time of the Montreal Expo. It also contains the appearance of burning due to a fire under renovation.

A video of the office of Schemata Architects in Aoyama, Tokyo.

South Kilburn Estate which is located in Kilburne in northern London where Alison Brooks Architects conducts redevelopment. Designers and residents talk about 44 apartment houses completed in the first phase of the project.

The owner and architect talk about “Villa Engels” which Lucian Engels completed in 1958 and they renovated recently.

A documentary of Frank Gehry when he finished his own house.

A documentary released one year after the death of Zaha Hadid. Stakeholders and critics talk from early drawings to works of later years.

A minimal short documentary of a house until it landed on the ground.

A trailer of a documentary “Integral Man” depicting the relationship between James Stuart, a mathematician / violinist and his “Integral House” designed by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects.

Short documentary following the activities of OMA’s think tank organization AMO.

A documentary of Canadian Robert Bezeau, who is constructing a village from over 1 million bottles on the Bocas del Toro Islands in Panama.

Designers and inhabitants talk about London’s “Grand Union Canal Walk Housing” designed by Nicholas Grimshaw.

TitanPointe, a windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan that was found to be the NSA’s spy hub by the Snowden document. A documentary on this buildings designed to withstand nuclear explosions.

Barbicania is a feature-length film capturing a month-long immersion in the life of the Barbican Centre and Estate in London, one of the most representative achievements of brutalist architecture.
The film, built as a personal diary, recounts on a daily basis what the directors duo has discovered during their urban trip from the top floors of the towers to the underground levels of the art centre.
Barbicania invites you to discover the personalities, lifestyle and architectural landscapes that make the Barbican so special. Drawing an intimate human map of the place, the film questions the durability of this utopia of the 50s.
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“An original and clever cinematographic language which deeply innovates the architecture representation.” Icon Design
“Beka & Lemoine animate the fortress and turn the darkest building of London into a series of colourful short stories.” L’Espresso
“An intimate and lively filmic map of Barbican’s Brutalist masterpiece.” Domus
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More information on the project:
living-architectures.com/

The Infinite Happiness is a highly unusual architectural experience. The film takes us to the heart of one of the contemporary housing developments considered to be a new model of success: the giant “8 House” designed in 2009 by Danish architects BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group in the suburbs of Copenhagen.
Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine recount their month-long immersion inside this experiment of vertical village, nominated “World best residential building” in 2011.
As a Lego game, the film builds up a collection of life stories all interconnected by their personal relation to the building. Drawing the lines of a human map, the film reveals the building through an inner and intimate point of view. By showing the surprising results of this innovative social model, the directors question the architecture’s ability to create collective happiness.
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“Breathtaking! Politiken
“An ode to the social power of architecture!” Der Standard
““So original, so vivid and witty. Beka and Lemoine bring the gods down to earth.” Der Tagesspiegel
“Wonderful! Blessedly free of the customary documentary trappings.” Chicago Tribune
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More information on the project:
living-architectures.com/

In central Arizona there exists an experimental town called Arcosanti. It’s built on the principles of arcology, which combines architecture and ecology to envision a city that works in tandem with the Earth’s resources. In this short documentary, The Atlantic goes inside this distinctive urban space to understand how Arcosanti plans to reconstruct how humans envision cities.

Metric film about Mies Van Der Rohe
In order of appearance
Weissenhof Estate 1927
weissenhof2002.de/
Barcelona Pavillon 1929
miesbcn.com/
Villa Tugendhat 1930
tugendhat.eu/
Bauhaus 1930 (If you plan to visit, you can sleep in the former student room, a once in a lifetime experience)
bauhaus-dessau.de/
George Washington Bridge 1927
Clip from Prelinger Archives – archive.org/
Farnsworth House 1951
farnsworthhouse.org/
860-880 Lake Shore Apartments
860880lakeshoredrive.com/
S.R. Crown Hall 1956
arch.iit.edu/
Neue Nationalgalerie 1968 (from 2015 to 2019 in renovation)
smb.museum/en/museums-and-institutions/neue-nationalgalerie/home.html
I also filmed the Aachen Cathedral, Seagram Building, Chicago Federal Center, Toronto-Dominion Center, One IBM Plaza, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library but I have chosen not to include the footage in the film.
Mies Van Der Rohe and Martin Gropius interview: “Bauhaus Reviewed, 1919-1933”
Thanks to Yulia for helping me with the filming.
Alexandre Favre 2012 -2015

Six celebrated architects, including Bjarke Ingels, Liz Diller and Daniel Libeskind, here talk about what it’s like to build architecture that both matters and works in the iconic city of New York – from Ground Zero to The High Line.
“A building should not look like Lady Gaga,” says American architect Robert A.M. Stern (b. 1939), who feels that the city is made up of background and foreground buildings, and that it is important to learn how to let the buildings work together instead of isolating them.
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (b. 1974) stresses how important it is to care about and understand the people one is designing for: “Architects need to re-insert architecture as something that people are interested in – not just architects – something that is important for society.”
“In a sense it was a non-site without ground to stand on.” American architect and founding partner of Snøhetta, Craig Dykers (b. 1961), talks about the challenging experience of building the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at Ground Zero.
According to American architect Thom Mayne (b. 1944), architecture is essentially “a way of thinking, exploring, inventing, making and participating in the world.”
American architect Liz Diller (b. 1954) discusses her fascinating project The High Line, which is a public park built on a historic freight rail line elevated plus 30 feet above the streets of Manhattan’s West Side.
“People stopped me: ‘Thank you Mr. Libeskind. You delivered what you promised’. They didn’t say anything else. They shook my hand. I thought that was the best compliment I could get.” Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946) shares his personal story of getting to work on such a poignant project as Ground Zero.
The interviews can be watched in full length at channel.louisiana.dk/topics/architecture
All interviews by Marc-Christoph Wagner, Kasper Bech Dyg and Jesper Bundgaard/Out of Sync.
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Edited by: Klaus Elmer
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016

I produced Architecture & Influence as part the Philip Johnson Glass House Oral History Project for use on their web site and in their visitor center. Working with Project Director, Dorothy Dunn, we interviewed Norman Foster, Michael Graves. Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Jaquelin T. Robertson, Richard Rogers, Vincent Scully, and Robert A. M. Stern–individuals for whom Philip Johnson was mentor, sponsor, and friend. I was responsible for selecting excerpts from the oral history interviews, selecting imagery, and scripting and editing the program in collaboration with Dorothy Dunn.

Koolhaas Houselife portrays one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture of recent years: the house in Bordeaux, designed by Rem Koolhaas / OMA in 1998.
The film lets the viewer enter into the daily intimacy of the house through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building. As we follow and interact with Guadalupe, an unusual and unpredictable look at the spaces and structure of the building opens up.
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“Heartfelt, thought-provoking and hilariously funny.” The New York Times
“A thoroughly delightful film!” The Wall Street Journal
“A cult movie.” El Pais
“Magic.” Le Monde
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More information on the project at:
living-architectures.com/

Postmodernism is the notoriously slippery subject tacked by the V&A’s exhibition, ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’. This fast-paced film features some of the most important living Postmodern practitioners, Charles Jencks, Robert A M Stern and Sir Terry Farrell among them, and asks them how and why Postmodernism came about, and what it means to be Postmodern.

TRANSCRIPT:

Andrew Logan: Post modernism – yes, I still really don’t understand what post modernism is. I’ve been told many times and it’s been explained to me many times and I still am bewildered. But perhaps that’s part of the movement – bewilderment.

Malcolm Garrett: I don’t think I really know too much about what post modernism actually is. For me, it’s primarily an architectural movement.

Robert A M Stern: Post modernism was a kind of style and it was kind of outrageous style at that.

Zandra Rhodes: I think we’re originals, but it wasn’t until I got spoken to by the V&A that I thought about anything that was post modern.

The way I worked I described as retrievalism.

Charles Jencks: The Independent said do use the word ‘post modernism’ because it means absolutely nothing and everything.

Malcolm Garrett: I called myself a new futurist for a while. So that’s a term I would use rather than post modernism.

Andrew Logan: Well, I suppose I had a very post modernist occurrence – I took acid. Normal things suddenly turned into something extraordinary.

Zandra Rhodes: Well, in 1977 punk was just starting to happen and I thought why not do tears that actually look like tears and then got safety pins and beaded round them like 12 years before Versace.

Malcolm Garrett: I had access to the first photocopier and I was able to modify and change the look of the image using a photocopier.

Peter Saville: And, of course, in the 70s and into the 80s the record cover was this incredibly important, vital medium of visual information. There were the music papers and occasionally the Sunday Times colour supplement might just do something about Andy Warhol in New York and that would be about it.

Paula Scher: In the 70s when I first started designing there was a predominance of the international style where the ultimate goal was to be clean and I always felt that that was like trying to clean up your room. So I was looking for ways of designing typography that could be more expressive, that were not about creating order but were about creating spirit.

Robert A M Stern: Times Square was where we were in charge – the whole revitalisation of Times Square is a very interesting, complicated story, but it does show the difference between the modernist point of view of how to redevelop or to develop a city and what we were able to do …

Charles Jencks: Post modern architecture is really to do with pluralism. You’ll find its depth, all of the great post modernism, the philosophy and now in literature, is about pluralism, pluralism, pluralism.

Robert A M Stern: To say, no, no, it’s a mess, in fact we ought to make it more of a mess. The world comes to Times Square not for tidykins, but for mess.

Charles Jencks: It’s accepting that the modern world with Freud, Marx, Henry Ford, mass production, is positive, but it can be radically improved.

Robert A M Stern: We studied the signage in Times Square and then we set minimums, minimums for sizes of signs, minimums for brightness of signs. What we were legislating in a way the capitalist impulse. Once you tell an entrepreneur that his or her sign can only be this big, he will be satisfied, he will agree with it. But if you say it can be this big or bigger or brighter, well everybody wants to compete in a capitalist society.

Charles Jencks: So you have to be on the one hand ironic about failures, probably the beginning of a new depression, another crisis of modernism, modernisation, modernity. What’s going to get us out of this? We have to re-think the modern movements in all the arts and in society and post modernism is the umbrella term for re-thinking.

Robert A M Stern: We knew 42nd Street was an incredible success when the Consolidated Edison Company called the State of New York and said, you know our grid is zapped out.

Peter Saville: In the case of, particularly, Joy Division and then New Order, they could never exactly agree amongst themselves. There was no hierarchical structure, particularly in New Order after the end of Joy Division, after Ian Curtis had died. The responsibility for the covers came to me and so they were about what I was interested in, they were about in a way beginning to learn the canon.

Carol McNicoll: The thing that I was doing was I was using slip casting. A lot of the Leach tradition and minimalist things also had that idea of expressing the deep, inner, mystic qualities of clay. And I thought that was a load of complete rubbish. And I thought what was wonderful about clay was the fact that you could make it look like anything else.

“Quality is an attitude of mind.” The great architectural mastermind of our time Norman Foster, who turned 80 in June 2015, here reflects on a long and prosperous career – and life – with prominent buildings and more than 1,000 employees all over the world.

Foster has always considered technology to be an ally. As a child he was immensely excited by machines and their speed – he spent many hours making sketches of and reading about them. He left school at age 16, did National Service for two years, worked different jobs to earn money, but never abandoned his private world of drawing and dreaming. When he discovered that he as an architect could actually do the things that had always excited him, it simply didn’t feel like work.

Respecting the structure of a city or a place is essential: “I’ve realized the important links between individual buildings and infrastructure.” Architecture has to address the bigger issues and make a difference to the world we live in. Architects can’t solve every problem in the world, but what they can do, however, is to contribute by turning the complex into something simple via shape as well as material and being aware of the “urban glue” that binds everything together: “We have rethought, redesigned, reinvented. We have questioned and gone back to basics.”

Norman Robert Foster (b. 1935) is an English architect and designer, who is considered one of the most prolific architects of his generation. He is the founder of Foster and Partners (1967) and responsible for renowned buildings such as London City Hall and Millennium Bridge (London), Reichstag (Berlin), Bilbao Metro, Hearst Tower (New York), Hong Kong International Airport, Beijing Capital International Airport and Apple Spaceship Headquarters (est. 2016). Foster, who is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers and winner of the society’s highest award, The Minerva Medal, has received several awards such as the Pritzker-prize in 1999 (often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture), the Stirling Prize in 1998 and 2004, as well as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture – the biggest architectural award in the world – for the University of Technology Petronas in Malaysia (2007). He was knighted in 1990, and in 1999 he was created a life peer, as Baron Foster of Thames Bank, of Reddish in the County of Greater Manchester.

Norman Foster was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his home near Geneva, Switzerland in April 2015.

Camera: Mathias Nyholm
Edited by: Kamilla Bruus
Music: ‘Draw a Blank’ by Søren Dahl Jeppesen (from Find the Tune)
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015

Supported by Nordea-fonden