Michael Blackwood

This group of New York composers, the heirs to Philip Glass and Steve Reich, are part of a vibrant generation bred from rock music and pop culture. The Bang on a Can festival, from which all six emerged, has become a significant part of the musical life of the city, as have its creators. Unlike their predecessors, who see themselves as coming from the classical tradition, they live in an era of permissiveness, free and open to experiment in music....

Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect, proposes an international architecture that he believes can only be conceived by someone Japanese. His architecture mixes Piranesian drama with contemplative spaces in urban complexes, residences and chapels. This film presents the formative years of his impressive career before he embarked on projects in Europe and the United States.

Despite his time-consuming responsibilities as Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Bernard Tschumi managed to produce an impressive body of work. At his final lecture at Columbia in April, 2003, he presents his views of contemporary architecture and its issues and gives an overview of the outstanding examples of his own work. Tschumi also critically examines the approach to solving the problem of the vacuum left by the destruction...

Produced at roughly the same time as The New Modernists 9 American Architects, this film examines an equally interesting selection of European architects. Critic Kenneth Frampton sees this group of architects, working from Seville to Finland, understanding and interacting with the ideas and structures of Aalto, Saarinen and Mies to form a confident new European identity

The British architect based in Stockholm looks back on major projects of a long career inspired by European Modernism combined with his personal sensitivity to nature and community. Erskine is especially valued for his vital understanding of social interaction, exemplified in commissions for universities and housing complexes built from Scandinavia to Italy. The architect takes the camera on a tour of his buildings while offering revealing comments...

Arata Isozaki is one of the most innovative and influential architects working today. In this video, released in 1985, he visits his most significant early buildings in Japan from the period 1960-1983. The extraordinary series of architectural breakthroughs made during this time contributed significantly to the evolution of contemporary architecture worldwide, and eventually gained him his first foreign commission: The Museum of Contemporary Art in...

Set in and around East 77th Street, NEW YORKERS follows inhabitants of the neighborhood, documenting their small businesses, daily encounters and commentary on New York in the 1970s. With the neighborhood experiencing changes in culture, cost and character we get to know a wide range of residents, each vastly different from the last.

Through a blend of Japanese history and Western influence, Arata Isozaki has built a career around his boldly distinctive architectural style. Constantly challenging the concepts of space, form and tradition, Isozaki’s work dares us to imagine a merging of cultures where artistic movements and methods bind together in riveting new forms. "ARATA ISOZAKI II: INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS" follows the architect to many of his most famous sites including the...

Bernd and Hilla Becher discuss their beginnings as documentarians of 19th century industrial architecture while showing us their retrospective exhibition at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Bernd and Hilla Becher had been working together as photographers since 1957, documenting and classifying endangered architecture, such as industrial structures, that are now vanishing from the modern landscape. By the end of the 1960's they became part of the...

This documentary explores the artistic connection between Robert Motherwell’s Open Series and Rafael Alberti’s poetry cycle, A La Pintura. Infatuated with Alberti’s text, Motherwood uses his words as the subject for his first venture into aquatints at Tatyana Grosman’s printmaking workshop. Historic footage shows Alberti, the last member of the Garcia Lorca generation, reading his poetry aloud. His poetic themes voice an homage to painting,...