Architecture & Design (collection)
From chairs mass-produced to hand-crafted, architects and architecture, buildings made of mud to high-rises, landscapes, cities and city planning, OVID offers a wide-ranging collection of over thirty films exploring our built environments, and how to live in them.
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Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect
Directed by Markus Heidingsfelder, Min Tesch • Documentary • With Dirk Baecker, Cecil Balmond, Rem Koolhaas • 2008 • 98 minutes
Rarely has an architect caused as much sensation outside of the architecture community as Rem Koolhaas. His outstanding creations--such as the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, ...
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Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process
Directed by Jacob Jørgensen & Henrik Lundø • Documentary • 2010 • 77 minutes
From the huge golden sun of The Weather Project at the Tate Modern until last year's New York Waterfalls, Olafur Eliasson has managed to rattle audiences and art critics alike.
Filmmakers Henrik Lundø and Jacob Jørgens...
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Concrete Love: The Bohm Family
Directed by Maurizius Staerkle Drux • Documentary • With Gottfried Bohm, Elisabeth Bohm, Stephan Bohm, Peter Bohm, Paul Bohm • 2016 • 88 minutes
Pritzker Prize laureate Gottfried Böhm is widely regarded as Germany’s preeminent architect. The son of a master builder of churches, he’s also the pat...
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Aboriginal Architecture
Directed by Paul M. Rickard • Documentary • 2006 • 93 minutes
ABORIGINAL ARCHITECTURE, LIVING ARCHITECTURE offers a fascinating in-depth look into the diversity of North American Native architecture. Featuring expert commentary and stunning imagery, this program provides a virtual tour of seven ...
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One Big Home
Directed by Thomas Bena • Documentary • 2017 • 88 minutes
Gentrification comes in many forms. On the tiny island of Martha's Vineyard, where presidents and celebrities vacation, trophy homes threaten to destroy the island's unique character.
Twelve years in the making, ONE BIG HOME follows one ...
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Ô saisons ô châteaux
Directed by Agnès Varda • Documentary • With Danièle Delorme • 1956 • 21 minutes
This early Agnès Varda short looks at the castles of the Loire Valley — and the unusual histories and personalities behind them. Punctuated by first-person accounts, excerpts from well-known poems, and stylish re-cr...
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The Next Industrial Revolution
Directed by Chris Bedford and Shelley Morhaim • Documentary • With Susan Sarandon • 2001 • 55 minutes
While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete for ever scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more e...
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Unfinished Spaces
Directed by Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray • Documentary • 2012 • 86 minutes
Cuba's ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists, Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi, in the wake of Castro's Revolution, is neglected, nearly forgotten, then ultimately ...
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How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?
Directed by Norberto López Amada & Carlos Carcas • Documentary • With Norman Foster, Buckminster Fuller, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anish Kapoor, Richard Rogers, Richard Serra • 2010 • 80 minutes
Born in Manchester, England, on the wrong side of the tracks, Norman Foster rose from a humble working class bac...
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The Oyler House: Richard Neutra's Desert Retreat
Directed by Michael Dorsey • Documentary • With Kelly Lynch • 2012 • 46 minutes
In 1959, a government employee named Richard Oyler, living in the tiny desert town of Lone Pine, California, asked world-famous modern architect Richard Neutra to design his modest family home. To Oyler's surprise, N...
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Monobloc
Directed by Hauke Wendler • Documentary • 2022 • 90 minutes
Universally recognized yet frequently discarded, the monobloc plastic chair has been the world’s best-selling piece of furniture since its invention in the 1970s, with over a billion units in circulation worldwide.
Hauke Wendler’s feat...
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Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman
Directed by Herb Stratford • Documentary • 2021 • 68 minutes
Gustav Stickley is one of the most recognizable names in American furniture. A visionary designer, he was the key driving force in bringing the Arts and Crafts movement to America in the early 1900s. His furniture work included what ha...
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Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes
Directed by Stephen Ives • Documentary • 2020 • 62 minutes
BEATRIX FARRAND'S AMERICAN LANDSCAPES follows award-winning public garden designer Lynden B. Miller as she sets off to explore the remarkable life and career of America's first female landscape architect, Beatrix Farrand. Farrand was res...
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The Human Scale
Directed by Andreas M. Dalsgaard • Documentary • With Jan Gehl • 2012 • 77 minutes
50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, by 2050 it will be 80%. Cities have become the primary human habitat. According to revolutionary Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, if we are to make c...
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Tiny: A Story About Living Small
Directed by Merete Mueller & Christopher Smith • Documentary • 2013 • 62 minutes
After a decade of travel, Christopher Smith approaches his 30th birthday and decides it's time to plant some roots. He impulsively buys a 5-acre plot of land in hopes of fulfilling a lifelong dream of building a hom...
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How to Build an Igloo
Directed by Douglas Wilkinson • Documentary • 1949 • 10 minutes
A demonstration of igloo-building in Canada's Far North, showing how the site is selected and how blocks of snow are used to make a snug shelter in only an hour and a half. As the camera follows each stage, the commentary explains t...
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Future of Mud
Directed by Susan Vogel • Documentary • 2007 • 58 minutes
Through the story of a mason in Djenne, Komusa Tenapo, and his family, this documentary examines an African tradition of mud architecture in Mali. The environmental genius of these ancient construction techniques thick walls with tiny win...
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Suspension
Directed by Simón Uribe Martínez • Documentary • 2020 • 75 minutes
Deep in the misty jungle of southern Colombia, between treacherously steep mountain slopes, stands an unfinished concrete bridge as an absurd symbol of human folly. Once intended as a link in the new “bypass” that was supposed to...
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All the World's Memory
Directed by Alain Resnais • Documentary • 1956 • 21 minutes
This recently restored early short by French New Wave director Alain Resnais (perhaps best known for Hiroshima Mon Amour), pays homage to the National Library of France. For centuries, the library has served as a repository for all the ...
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The Destruction of Memory
Directed by Tim Slade • Documentary • 2016 • 85 minutes
The bombing of Sarajevo's National Library and the burning of its ancient books. The looting of the Iraqi National Museum and destruction of its priceless historical objects. The beheading of Kahled al-Asaad, long-time lead archaeologist fo...
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The Absent House
Directed by Ruben Abruna • Documentary • 2013 • 55 minutes
A designer from Puerto Rico pioneered green architecture thirty years ago, and today he confronts climate change with sustainable constructions including a house without a roof that is completely independent of the power and water utilit...
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Biophilic Design
Directed by Stephen R. Kellert & Bill Finnegan • Documentary • 2012 • 62 minutes
Come on a journey from our evolutionary past and the origins of architecture to the world's most celebrated buildings in a search for the architecture of life. Together, we will encounter buildings that connect peop...
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The Best of Both Worlds
Directed by John de Graaf • Documentary • 2020 • 27 minutes
Originally a Danish creation, cohousing struggled to gain popularity in its country of origin for years. That is, until a film was made that explained its merits and how people found it enhanced their lives. Now a new film by award-winn...
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Kochuu
Directed by Jesper Wachtmeister • Documentary • 2003 • 53 minutes
Kochuu is included on the same DVD as Great Expectations KOCHUU is a visually stunning film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition, and its impact on the Nordic building tradition. Winding its way ...