Hasta La Ideas

Change is afoot at the New York Public Library, which tapped Foster + Partners to mastermind an ambitious expansion that will more than double the public space within the 42nd Street building while preserving the 101-year-old landmark’s facade and its original interiors. Norman Foster joined NYPL President Anthony Marx last week at the library to unveil the initial schematic designs, which call for a new 100,000-square-foot lending library along with enhanced spaces for scholars, writers, and researchers. The video below offers an animated sneak peek at what the library will look like in 2018, once the project is completed. Entering through the library’s Fifth Avenue entrance, the camera travels on an east-to-west axis through the building’s first floor.

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It’s been a great year for documentaries, from Chad Friedrichs‘s exploding of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth to filmic glimpses into the lives and work of artists including Marina Abramović, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Wayne White, and Gregory Crewdson. Many of these films owe a debt to Ken Burns, whose signature effects include “a way of energizing still photographs, of adding complex sound effects and period music, of using not only a third-person narrator…but first-person voices, reading journals and diaries and love letters and newspaper accounts that give the experience of the past something that feels real and feels human,” he tells the MediabistroTV crew in the below video. Watch to learn how Burns, who says he knew at age 12 that he wanted to make movies, got his start “trying to tell stories and [using] American history to tell those stories that I wanted to tell.”

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Frank Gehry in a 1976 interview, now digitized and online in the SCI-Arc Media Archive.

You’ve exhausted your Netflix queue and watched every episode of Homeland (twice), but fresh video wonders await you in the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)’s Media Archive, which is now online with more than 1,000 hours–and counting–of architecture and design lectures, symposia, and events dating to 1974. Among the video trove is this 1976 interview with Frank Gehry. “The work of Donald Judd fascinates me. It’s sort of using cheap materials and getting a lot of response out of it,” a 47-year-old Gehry tells Shelly Kappe. “I guess that’s minimal art…I’m not just interested in minimal art, though. I don’t think that’s my whole thing, although it appears that way in some of the buildings. I’m more into the illusionary qualities of a building and creating a visual richness without it really being there. You almost have to trip over it. I guess it’s minimal in that sense.”

Created with funding from the Getty Foundation (as part of the “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture” initiative) and the National Endowment for the Arts, the web-based archive also includes rare footage of Charles Eames, Zaha Hadid, David Hockney, Rem Koolhaas, John Lautner, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, and Kazuyo Sejima, among hundreds of others. And many of the architects and artists appear more than once, providing opportunities to analyze their development over the span of their careers. Don’t miss the “Exhibits” section, which features handpicked assortments of videos around particular themes. Delve into one called “Unfrozen Music (and Dancing)” and you’ll encounter Richard Neutra‘s wife, Dione, singing folksongs and accompanying herself on the cello.

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A scene from the Hanoch Levin opera The Child Dreams, for which artist Gottfried Helnwein designed the sets and costumes. (Courtesy First Run Features)

Austrian-born Gottfried Helnwein is the rare artist who can give Gerhard Richter a run for his money when it comes to hazy-haunting figuration that evokes–beautifully, repulsively, beautifully again–unspeakable atrocities. But while Richter has tackled everything from Düsenjägers to deckchairs, Helnwein, now 64, continues to focus on children. It’s a central theme he discovered during his student days in Vienna when he began to paint small watercolors of bandaged and wounded children, based on World War II forensic photos. People were shocked by the work, and Helnwein was just as stunned by their reaction. “The strange thing for me was always that the horrible stuff that was going on, the violence against children that couldn’t defend themselves, was not a problem for people,” he says in Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child, a documentary that opens today at New York’s Quad Cinema. “War was not a problem for them. The Holocaust was not a problem. But an innocent image–a watercolor! a tiny watercolor!–would upset them.”

Filmmaker Lisa Kirk Colburn follows Helnwein, a charismatic cross between Alice Cooper and Christopher Walken (with an Austrian accent), as he takes on the role of production designer for the Israeli Opera’s world premiere of The Child Dreams, by the late Hanoch Levin. Peopled by nameless characters such as “The Bleeding Man,” the opera tells a universal story about the tragedy of a child. Helnwein arrives in Tel Aviv with a grand vision that he fights to preserve amidst logistical limitations, opera star egos, Israeli labor laws that soon put the kibosh on child actors, and a stubborn yet brilliant lighting designer named Bambi. It’s fascinating to watch Helnwein, unaccustomed to creative compromise, navigate the details and politics of a large-scale theatrical production, whether by rolling up his sleeves to daub cobalt onto a foam boulder so that it matches a craggy Caspar David Friedrich scene or micromanaging the stage makeup (“Give him something to make him more the face of evil,” he directs a makeup artist). In the end, Helnwein is pleased. “It brought all of the children I have painted before together,” he says of the opera’s fourth act (pictured above). “I treat the staging like a canvas, but it’s three-dimensional and everything moves.”

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This year’s TED Conference was a doozy, in large part due to “The Design Studio” session organized by guest curators Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell. Among the engaging creative types they convinced to take the TED Stage (temporarily adorned with Maira Kalman illustrations for the occasion) was Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his TED Talk, now available online, Campbell reveals why an orgy is preferable to a bacchanal, his eureka moment with tapestries, and why nothing compares to the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative: “what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that unpacks it for a general audience.”

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