Maestro Plecnik

This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.

Dear Maestro

The British architect based in Stockholm looks back on major projects of a long career inspired by European Modernism combined with his personal sensitivity to nature and community. Erskine is especially valued for his vital understanding of social interaction, exemplified in commissions for universities and housing complexes built from Scandinavia to Italy. The architect takes the camera on a tour of his buildings while offering revealing comments and interpretations.

In Buffalo, N.Y., some of the greatest works of American architecture relay a remarkable story that resonates with the universal themes of home, family and friendship. The charismatic Frank Lloyd Wright, destined to become America’s greatest architect, called Darwin Martin, an unassuming, wealthy businessman from Buffalo, his “best friend.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo reveals how Martin’s three decades of support fostered Wright’s career and led to some of the architect’s renowned masterpieces—the Larkin Administration Building, the Darwin Martin Estates and the Martin summer home, Graycliff—all in Buffalo, New York.

Schaub and Schindelm’s documentary follows two Swiss star architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, on two very different projects: the national stadium for the Olympic summer games in Peking 2008 and a city area in the provincial town of Jinhua, China.

Equal parts film, conversation, and social experiment, this interactive documentary uses footage shot by activists in the crowd of the Maribor uprisings, a 2012 to 2013 Slovenian protest, to pull you into the fray, where you must collectively decide what happens next.

A portrait of the internationally acclaimed Japanese architect who employs Buddhist ideas and western modernism to achieve intercultural architecture.

Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect, proposes an international architecture that he believes can only be conceived by someone Japanese. His architecture mixes Piranesian drama with contemplative spaces in urban complexes, residences and chapels. This film presents the formative years of his impressive career before he embarked on projects in Europe and the United States.

Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926) designed some of the world's most astonishing buildings, interiors, and parks; Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara constructed some of the most aesthetically audacious films ever made. With camera work as bold and sensual as the curves of his subject's organic structures, Teshigahara immortalizes Gaudí on film.

A modern explorer leads us on a global journey to discover how nine of the world's greatest architects are shaping our future.

An excellent display of how humans can rehabilitate and restore an area where a heavy industry polluted the water so severely that it was unsuitable to sustain any kind of life. A a film showing how birds returned to an environment once devastated by industry. The lakes around the northern Slovenian town of Velenje, placed in the Central Europe, are geographic center of the film. They emerged as the land above the lignite mines subsided and the depressions were filled with water. The mines started operating at the end of the 19th century. In the mid 20th century a power plant was built that caused a severe pollution of the lake waters to the extent of the lakes not being fit for any kind of life. As a consequence many birds moved from these parts. After a long ecological restoration that started in the mid 1980s, life returned to the water. Gradually the birds returned as well, including some there were previously never observed in this area.

Ztracený architekt Ernst Wiesner

A poet among architects and an innovator among educators, John Hejduk converses with poet David Shapiro at The Cooper Union about the mystery and spirit of architecture. His own sketches and structures are shown

Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor, designer, architect, and craftsman. Throughout his life he struggled to see, alter, and recreate his natural surroundings. His gardens and fountains were transformations meant to bring out the beauty their locations had always possessed.

The documentary follows seven stories from the set of deadly
sins and virtues. The concepts have been interpreted through the ambiguity, associations and meanings triggered by various social contexts.
Using phenomena from our recent history, the story focuses on justice, prudence, sloth, greed, gluttony, temperance, pride. With regard to each phenomenon, i.e. each sin or/and virtue, there is the question of the duality of borders. If virtue is a desire subdued, and sin a desire that goes too far and crosses the border, this necessarily implies an area of ambiguity, of borders and questions about what is right and what isn’t.

Codelli is a feature-length docudrama about a little-known film project by Slovenian inventor Baron Anton Codelli. Together with filmmaker and adventurer Hans Schomburgk he filmed in Togo in 1914 the first live-action film in Africa, which possibly inspired James Rice Burroughs for his novel on Tarzan. In the company of three Codelli’s descendants and actor Primož Bezjak, we traced the fate of Codelli’s film, brought the remains from Togo and Berlin to Ljubljana and used the Green Screen technology to bring to life 15 live-action scenes based on 600 Codelli’s museum photographs.

To understand firsthand what the United States of America can learn from other nations, Michael Moore playfully “invades” some to see what they have to offer.

Southern California’s Coachella Valley, including the communities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, boasts hundreds of extraordinary midcentury modern homes, public buildings and commercial structures. Modern designers such as William F. Cody, Albert Frey, William Krisel, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Donald Wexler, E. Stewart Williams left their collective mark on this desert paradise. Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs traces the history of modern architecture in Palm Springs from the first bold forays into modernist design to the preservation challenges facing the region today. Director Jake Gorst’s film features rare archival images and footage as well as interviews with historians, homeowners and the architects who helped create this mecca of modernism.

An architect whose iconic buildings defined a newly independent Cambodia struggles to come to terms with the reckless development that threatens his legacy.

If you were to design your dream house now that you're at the end of your life, what would it look like? This question from the filmmaker to her father, retired architect Karlhans Pfleiderer, is the starting point of Das Retirée or the last house of my father. Slowly but surely, the house takes form, first drawn on shifting layers of transparent paper, then glued into a scale model. Between the words and the gestures, the film of the daughter becomes the father’s last house, a space in which unspoken words, unfulfilled desires can appear, disclosing coping-mechanisms that have survived several generations.