A new documentary airing on PBS gives some flesh to the ghost of New York City’s original Penn Station.

The 25 films in this year's festival focus on urbanism and the legacy of Modernism. The Human Scale, screening at the Architecture & Design Film Festival on October 16.The theme of this year’s Architecture & Design Film Festival, running in New York October 16-20, is urbanism—a subject that never seems to go out of style, especially with non-fiction filmmakers. The scale of city life, the rituals, struggles, triumphs, and failures, create innumerable stories (eight million in New York City alone) so monumental that they must be captured; so fleeting that only the immediacy of film can do them justice. But

Daniel Libeskind and Marina Abramovíc have a surprisingly personal discussion about their favorite movies with author and film scholar Antonio Monda. Photo © Mario Bucolo Starchitect Daniel Libeskind. Omnipresent performance artist Marina Abramovíc. Two big personalities. On stage, together, talking about movies. What could go right? Photo © Mario Bucolo From left: Daniel Libeskind, Marina Abramovíc, and Antonio Monda at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. A lot, it turns out.On Thursday, Abramovíc and Libeskind met at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York for “Films of My Life,” part of the ongoing Le Conversazioni program hosted

Daniel Libeskind and Marina Abramovíc have a surprisingly personal discussion about their favorite movies with author and film scholar Antonio Monda. Photo © Mario Bucolo Starchitect Daniel Libeskind. Omnipresent performance artist Marina Abramovíc. Two big personalities. On stage, together, talking about movies. What could go right? Photo © Mario Bucolo From left: Daniel Libeskind, Marina Abramovíc, and Antonio Monda at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. A lot, it turns out.On Thursday, Abramovíc and Libeskind met at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York for “Films of My Life,” part of the ongoing Le Conversazioni program hosted

Read our preview of the new PBS documentary and then cast your vote for the building that has most influenced life in the United States. One of the 10 Buildings that Changed America: H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston. It’s easy to take the American architectural cannon for granted. These are the structures that loom large, turning points in architectural history that also have a fixed place in pop culture. But how often does the public stop to consider why these well-known monuments were once revolutionary or reflect on how they shaped American culture? In the new PBS program 10

Filmmaker Su Friedrich discusses Gut Renovation, a personal and impassioned documentary about the transformation of a Brooklyn neighborhood. Still from Su Friedrich's documenatary Gut Renovation. This week, When SHoP Architects unveiled plans to overhaul the Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, it marked the most recent chapter in the area’s transformation from low-rise industrial zone to inexpensive artists’ enclave to in-demand residential district. In her impassioned new documentary, Gut Renovation, director and Su Friedrich chronicles that change over the course of several years. The film is at once a documentary about 21st century urbanism and an extremely intimate look

A new film charts the fight to redevelop America’s iconic amusement area. Photo © Amy Nicholson A protest on the boardwalk following the announcement of the city’s compromised plans for Coney Island. As it plays out on screen, no civic battle in recent New York history has been as contentious and passionate as the one between developer Joe Sitt and Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the future of Coney Island. The fight was the culmination of a complex tangle of zoning laws, neglect, tradition, class warfare, and lots and lots of money. Director Amy Nicholson's 77-minute documentary Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild

With his latest Dark Knight film, Christopher Nolan gives us a Gotham for our times. Photo © Ron Phillips/Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Comics Christian Bale as Batman on a Gotham rooftop in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. For nearly 75 years, Batman and Gotham City have been symbiotically connected, one essential to the formation of the other. And each new iteration of the character has brought with it a new city. Gotham began life as an exaggerated New York, but since the 1980s, Batman has become darker and more psychological, and with him, the city has become more conceptual and

Photo © Peter Ash Lee/courtesy Checkerboard Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, and Charles Renfro are featured in a film being shown at the National Gallery. This week, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will host the first retrospective of documentaries by the Checkerboard Film Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1979 to produce, distribute, and archive films that document American artists and the artistic process. As the title suggests—“Celebrating New American Architecture and Design: A Salute to Checkerboard Film Foundation”—the retrospective will put the spotlight on the organization’s architecture documentaries, with 10 films screened over a two-day period. Related links Five