Hasta La Ideas

Rushing water, DNA helices, stop-motion footage of a city at night. Put ‘em together and what have you got? A generic brand video. Royalty-free stock footage purveyor Dissolve.com seized upon the formula outlined by Kendra Eash in a recent piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and brought it to life in this amusing short, made entirely with stock footage and narrated with an avuncular twang by Dallas McClain.

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This month marked the Los Angeles debut of the Architecture & Design Film Festival. We dispatched writer Brigette Brown to take in a few of the 30 flicks on offer along with the program of talks and panels. The five-day festival kicked off with If You Build It, a documentary that follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller as they lead a group of high school students in rural North Carolina through a year-long design-build project, and wrapped up on a similar note, with a closing panel entitled “Hands-on, Ground-up: Community and Design/Build.”

The Los Angeles Theater Center, an early-nineteenth century bank turned theater, was the setting for the inaugural L.A. edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival. (All photos courtesy ADFF)

“Hands-on, Ground-up,” the final program of the Architecture & Design Film Festival in Los Angeles, left the audience wondering how we, as community members, designers, architects, and structure aficionados, can collaborate and build more. How can we push ourselves back into building and problem solving away from the computer, getting our hands dirty?

Architecture critic Mimi Zeiger moderated a panel of seasoned minds in the architecture and design/build field: Steve Badanes (pictured at right with festival founder and co-director, Kyle Bergman) professor of architecture and director of the Neighborhood Design Build Studio at the University of Washington; Jenna Didier, founder of experimental design and exhibition space, Materials & Applications; and, Dave Sellers, founder of Sellers and Company Architects. Though each panelist approaches the topic of design/build differently in their practices—professor, architect, artist—they each showed how small steps within design culture can help guide American culture to a more hands-on way of living.

“Why is it important to talk about design/build right now?” Zeiger asked to kick off the discussion. This simple “why should we care?” question shaped the conversation that followed. “A day’s work usually involves staring at a screen, pushing around a bar of soap, and maybe answering a few emails and sending some texts,” said Badanes. “So, you don’t really get the satisfaction that you’ve accomplished anything. When you make things, it’s really visceral…you have the satisfaction that you’ve made something.” The panelists agreed that design/build is about getting back in touch with making things. Using a hammer, painting columns and, as Sellers said, “having the oldest lady you can find make [you] blueberry pies” to eat on site are what architecture and design should be about.
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Paolo Soleri gets his close-up in a documentary now making the festival rounds (next stop: Sedona). Lisa Scafuro‘s The Vision Of Paolo Soleri: Prophet in The Desert explores the life and work of the Italian-born architect, urban designer, artist, craftsman, and philosopher, who died last April at the age of 93. The film traces Soleri’s path from his formative time at Taliesin West, where he worked under Frank Lloyd Wright before setting off on a course of his own, driven by the dream to create an environment in harmony with people. Check the film’s Facebook page for news of the latest screenings. In the Washington, D.C. area? The Vision Of Paolo Soleri will screen at the National Building Museum on the evening of March 24.

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Design for extreme affordability. That’s the challenge presented by one course at Stanford University’s Institute of Design (better known as the d.school); how students address it—drawing on methods from engineering and industrial design in combination with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world—is the subject of a new documentary. In Extreme by Design, now available on iTunes, filmmakers Ralph King Jr. and Michael Schwarz follow d.schoolers as they create and test potentially life-saving products for those in the developing countries they visit. Here’s the trailer:

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The Whitney Museum, home to the responsive W, is counting down the days (OK, months) to its move downtown with the help of a new video series. Launched this week, Whitney Stories offers a glimpse behind the scenes of the museum’s future home, designed by Renzo Piano, through interviews with figures central to the project.

New York-based filmmaker Matt Wolf is directing a series of 15 videos, each focusing on a person with a particular role in the project. First up (below) is a profile of Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the Whitney’s associate director for conservation and research. Stay tuned for new videos to be released regularly, right up to the spring 2015 move, accompanied by articles and photo essays. Future subjects include Piano, director Adam Weinberg, building project manager Larissa Gentile, and Vincent Punch, who serves as assistant head guard at the museum.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.