Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak is on the quest to explain exactly what the Sistine Chapel's ceiling is actually trying to tell us.

Sacsayhuamán, an ancient citadel amidst the Peruvian Andes, is an architectural marvel. It was built more than 900 years ago, and no living person knows how such large rocks were fitted so perfectly into walls. This documentary takes us on a tour of Sacsayhuamán, offering a brief history of the site, and clues that may help to its understand how it was made. It was edited from photos and video taken in July 2012, when Russian geophysicists conducted soil research there, at the request of Peru's Ministry of Culture.

Inaugurated in 1986 by François Mitterrand, a link between the Louvre and Pompidou, Orsay houses the largest collection of Impressionist art in the world. Project after project, the museum has been transformed to modernize and welcome more visitors, while preserving its historic character. Challenges taken up with each new project.

A year in the life of one of America's most innovative classrooms where students design & build to transform their hometown community. The film follows Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller as they teach the fundamentals of design, architecture and construction to a class of high school juniors in rural North Carolina.

Drahý mistře

Demolition of the old and building of the new Kunsthalle in Mannheim in the years 2013 to 2018.

Architecture is often seen from the outside, as an inanimate object represented in still imagery. ‘REM’ exposes the human experience of architecture through dynamic film.

Gare du Nord : La Plus Grande Gare d'Europe

Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin is far from being a household name, yet he designed the iconic clock tower of Big Ben as well as much of the Palace of Westminster. The 19th-century Gothic revival that Pugin inspired, with its medieval influences and soaring church spires, established an image of Britain which still defines the nation. Richard Taylor charts Pugin's extraordinary life story and discovers how his work continues to influence Britain today.

Not many people know that there is in the center of Hong Kong, a city of 50,000 inhabitants that escape authority, a city which holds no law and no order, the ‘walled city’. Never before has a television crew been allowed to enter this labyrinth. Christa Wesemann, an Austrian documentary filmmaker, has achieved this for the first time. The recordings from the ‘walled city’ are breathtaking pictures, as it has never seen the world. The history and daily flow in Walled City are ruled by the ‘triad’, a Chinese crime syndicate.

In the same vein as Meri's other documentations, this one takes advantage of the glasnost policy to discuss the social and ecologic impact of the Russian oil industry on the natives and the lands they inhabit.

French architect Jean Nouvel has long been known in Europe for his bold, shimmering glass museums, concert halls, and high-rise towers. Now the much-acclaimed new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which opened in 2006, is displaying Nouvel's remarkable talents to an American public. With a cantilevered lobby that extends 175 feet over the Mississippi River, the dark midnight-blue, aluminum-paneled structure has captivated the culturally conscious city and helped spur the rejuvenation of a once-industrial waterfront. In the tour, Nouvel takes us through three distinctive theaters he designed for the Guthrie, and out onto the cantilevered deck to view the legendary river that inspired the boldly elevated design.

A film in three movements. In the first one, we find a historical synthesis of Brazilian architecture, from the slaves' dwellings to the Ministry of Education Building. In the second segment, architects such as Burle Marx, Lina Bo Bardi, Grigori Warchavchik and Joaquim Cardoso talk about architecture's social function. In the third movement, inhabitants of some Brazilian cities discuss the space they live in.

Lina Bo Bardi

Brasília

Tadao Ando (b.1941) is a world-renowned architect, and a recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His calm, minimalist architecture with elegant concrete designs reflects the Zen principle of simplicity. In the film he reveals the experience a building should evoke, as he discusses a number of iconic designs, such as The Row House and The Church of Light.

The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) is one of the great figures of modern architecture, ranked alongside Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. This film analyses Aalto’s uniquely successful resolution of the demands and possibilities created by new technology and construction materials with the need to make his buildings sympathetic both to their users and to their natural surroundings. His inventive use of timber in particular represents both a reference to the forest landscape of Finland and a building material that is ‘warm’ and extremely adaptable. Filmed in Finland, Italy, Germany and the USA, this documentary shows how the Finnish natural environment and art traditions were essential elements in Aalto’s pioneering harmonization of technology and nature.

In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of Brasília. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasília, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed Brasília to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. (Senses of Cinema)

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.

Arles, au cœur de la cité antique