The 79-minute documentary Design is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli, released on DVD last week, is a biography, of a kind, of the designer and his wife, originally hit the festival circuit in 2012. It neatly tracks Massimo and his wife Lella’s careers as the preeminent design team of the postwar era at something of a breakneck pace. A series of images of the Vignellis’ work flashes by at the start of the film as if we were quickly flipping through a retrospective (or high-end product) catalogue, and things don’t get much slower from there. Directors Kathy Brew and

The film crew, including Bassett (center) talks to John Boiler, CEO of 72andSunny, a design and advertising agency. By day the CEO of design and brand strategy firm Bassett & Partners, Tom Bassett moonlights as an occasional filmmaker. His first film, the 18-minute Connecting released in 2012, was co-produced by Microsoft Design and focused on the “Internet of Things.” His latest work is more ambitious. Briefly, a 26-minute film released for free online last month that explores how some uber-creatives work with, bend, manipulate, and subvert the document that kicks it all off—the project brief—to accomplish great end products. “We

Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago-based architect, conceived the concept for Lego Architecture, an elegant series of building sets celebrated in Lego Architecture: The Visual Guide, published last month. The relationship between Lego and architecture began in 1962 with the company’s Scale Model Series. It only lasted until 1965, but its impact was massive thanks to the introduction of the Lego plate. One-third the size of a traditional Lego brick, the plate added an element of stability that opened up a world of building possibility for kids and adults alike. But few took to the potential quite like architects. Moshe Safdie,

A documentary attempts to respond to the question raised by Michael Heizer's 340-ton granite boulder installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: "It's just a rock—how can it be art?" The boulder passes through La Mirada Park, California, on its way to LACMA. When artist Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass—a 340-ton granite boulder perched above a cavern of “negative space”—was installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2012, the reaction of more than a few people was, “It’s just a rock. How can it be art?” Two years later, director Doug Pray presents a kind

Jonas Mekas, who helped Warhol shoot the eight-hour film, reflects on the relevancy of a star vehicle for the Empire State Building.  Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964, © The Andy Warhol Museum Empire is a window on a bygone New York. On the evening of July 25, 1964, Pop artist Andy Warhol and five associates armed with a single camera and a bag of 33-minute film cartridges entered an office on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in Manhattan. For the next six hours, Warhol and his crew pointed their camera at the top third of the Empire State

Photo © Declan Quinn, courtesy Abramorama Wallace Shawn as Halvard Solness in A Master Builder. The cinematic partnership between Wallace Shawn and André Gregory—actors, writers, and renaissance men—spans 34 years and includes two classics: My Dinner with André (1980) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). Their third collaboration, A Master Builder, was released in cinemas in July and is currently playing at Film Forum in New York through August 5. And where the previous two films were masterpieces of a kind of anti-cinema, merging cinematography and stagecraft to find the sublime in the mundane, their latest film is despairingly straight

Filmmaker Richard Hankin hones in on the super-sized, New York real estate fight that has surrounded the rebuilding of Ground Zero. Film still © 16 Acres Janno Lieber of Silverstein Properties, architect Daniel Libeskind, and Larry Siverstein at a cermony for the 10th anniversary of September 11. Filmmaker Richard Hankin lived in New York at the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks. And like so many others, he watched Ground Zero become the epicenter of one of the most contentious redevelopment projects in American history. “It just seemed like it was endless in-fighting and nothing was getting done,” he

Michael KennaHomage to BrassaiLondon, Englandnegative 1983/print 1984Toned gelatin silver printGift of the George H. Ebbs Family, 2007.51.52 Architecture has been an irresistible subject for photographers since the birth of the medium, and like buildings themselves, architectural photography can be different things to different people—a malleability explored in the excellent exhibition Architecture + Photography, on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh through May 26. Using materials from the museum’s Heinz Architectural Center and Department of Photography, curator Tracy Myers and assistant Alyssum Skjeie built the show around four intersections between photography and architecture over a period of more

A new television series airing on PBS will help viewers develop an appreciation for the creativity, ingenuity, and expertise that went into popular buildings. “Cool” is one of those words that has been so overused to be almost meaningless. So when a television show comes along called Cool Spaces!—with an exclamation point no less!—you’d be excused for any apprehension. But the program, a four-part series that focuses on the best new architecture in the U.S. and premieres on PBS affiliates across the country early this month, is considerably better than its title. The goal of the show, says architect/teacher/host Stephen

After five years in New York (and a couple in Chicago), the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) is expanding to the West Coast.