Amancio Williams

Arne Jacobsen’s Modern Denmark

Danish documentary about the disobedient schoolboy with a talent for painting, who became one of Denmark’s greatest architects. His ideas were ahead of their time and often received criticism, but today, 50 years after his death, Arne Jacobsen's schools, town halls and libraries are still with us, and they define modern Denmark.

Vilanova Artigas: The Architect and the Light

The documentary rebuilds the life of the Brazilian architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas. His relatives, friends, students and six of his major works tell the history of this iconic Latin-American modernist.

Circles

The geometry of circles and ellipses is explored using the Roman Colosseum as an example. Using the Pantheon as another practical example, this program explores the concepts of central and intercepted angles, arc segments and chords. The Etude du Cinéma de l’Ecole de Barcelona (a short-lived group that appeared in Spain in the 1960s) offers the opportunity to consider the distrust of the avant-gardes with regard to narrative. The lacunar narration whose principle the School of Barcelona adopts goes against the traditional narrative and its quest for coherence and continuity. She invites the viewer to make the disconcerting experience of unbinding and emptiness. Such an approach involves an ethical posture. The Barcelona School follows in the footsteps of a modernity that intends to move away from an alienating authoritarian discourse and claims to make the spectator a partner in creation.

Eye Over Prague

A personal and political biography of the Octopus, or the Prague National Library project, but also a biography of the last years of the life of the author of this design, Jan Kaplický, who wrote in his diary in 1998: to win the competition and have one love. With this entry, read by Eliška Kaplicky at the beginning of the film, it is as if the world-class Czech architect wrote not only the "script" for the final decade of his life, but also for a film that follows the dramatic social story of creative imagination and the intimate relationship between a man and a woman.

Imaginary Architecture, the architect Hans Scharoun

Hans Scharoun has built houses which show not only structural substance and aesthetic forms but also how human beings should live in buildings. This depiction can only be imaginary - like reading invisible writing on walls. Bitomsky's film looks at several of Scharoun's buildings.

Dear Esther

In 1989, a woman writes a letter to her mentor. She reminisces about a life-changing campaign they spearheaded to save a historic home, Irving Gill's Walter Luther Dodge House in Los Angeles, twenty years prior.

Brutality in Stone

In his experimental short film "Brutalität in Stein" (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over.

Khufu Revealed

The Great Pyramids are the only wonder of the ancient world that still stand today, the greatest of which is the pyramid of Khufu. Many theories have been offered to explain its construction, but none as convincing or unique as this one.

Liquid Stone: Unlocking Gaudi's Secrets

The Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudi's most ambitious creation, was begun in the 19th century and is still under construction today. With Gaudi's tragic death in 1926 and the destruction of original models during the Spanish Civil War, the building languished for decades.

Strange and Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island

Architect Todd Saunders’s buildings on Fogo Island, Newfoundland embrace the excitement of being on the edge of nature and contemporary design while fulfilling the goal of doing ‘new things with old ways’. Saunders and commissioner, Zita Cobb, provide a personal account of the ideas and traditions that inspire this bold and socially ambitious architectural venture. Gorgeously photographed over the Island’s seven seasons, the film is a flowing, visual narrative that unfolds over time as the principal stage of the project, the Fogo Island Inn, approaches completion.

London

A psycho-geographic journey through London and its history, as undertaken by an unseen narrator and his companion, Robinson, at the time of the 1992 general election.

Secrets of Sacred Architecture

For most of America's history, sacred buildings represented our greatest feats of innovative engineering and artistic design. Unlock the elements of design that make these structures so fascinating and unveil the meaning in religious architecture, ranging from grand cathedrals and simple country churches to synagogues and mosques.

Bauhaus: The Face of the Twentieth Century

Bauhaus - The Face of the 20th Century, written and narrated by Frank Whitford, is an art documentary depicting the visual science generated from the outpouring of avant-garde ideas of this innovative educational undertaking.

Documentary: Rachel Whiteread, House

Rachel Whiteread’s cast of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End was hailed as one of the greatest public sculptures by an English artist in the twentieth century. Completed in autumn of 1993 and demolished in January 1994, House attracted tens of thousands of visitors and generated impassioned debate, in the local streets, the national press and in the House of Commons.

First Person Singular: I.M. Pei

Architect I.M. Pei speaks about his famous works, such as the addition to the Louvre in Paris, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas. Footage of these projects shows both interiors and exteriors. Various other experts comment on the impact and importance of Pei's work.

2021-1985

Confidential report on designer Dino Gavina's showroom created by Carlo Scarpa between 1961 and 1963. Restoration details and stills from a 1985 film by Ellis Donda.

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

In 1959 New York City announced a "slum clearance plan" by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state's first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the "real estate capital of the world."

Arles, au cœur de la cité antique

Chambord: The Castle, the King and the Architect

Chambord, the most impressive castle in the Loire Valley, in France, a truly Renaissance treasure, has always been an enigma to generations of historians. Why did King Francis I (1494-1547), who commissioned it, embark on this epic project in the heart of the marshlands in 1519? What significance did he want the castle to have? What role did his friend, Italian genius Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) play? Was he the architect or who was?

INFRASTRATA

Amongst the contemplative static shots of decaying architecture weaves an abstract narrative unveiling the life-cycle of a higher perception, too large to perceive. Shot at various sites across south-east England, INFRASTRATA is a study on the concept of super-organisms, and the relationship between structure and nature.