Watching the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, I waited eagerly for a section I don’t usually pay much attention to – the award for Best Documentary: Short Subject. As Jake Gyllenhall and Amy Adams opened the envelope, I was rooting for The Warriors of Qiugang, the rousing story of Chinese villagers who are protesting a pesticide factory that is poisoning their lives.

Filmed in 2007 by Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon, and co-produced by Yale Environment 360, the film follows the fortunes of the farmer Zhang Gongli, who is determined to have the chemical plant shut down. Its effluents have contaminated the village’s water sources, killing off the fish in the river, the crops in the fields, and over fifty people in two and a half years. The 39-minute film is full of colorful characters: conniving factory employees, angry villagers, the officials who are bribed to turn a blind eye, the city-bred environmentalists with their idealism, and my favorite, the village headman’s aunt who knows that her nephew is in cahoots with the factory and does not approve. As the inevitable things happen – villagers are beaten up, Zhang is threatened, and the factory re-opens – I realize that this is also a familiar story.

A scan from the October 1988 issue of Metropolis. Photos: Donna Mitchell.

In Metropolis’s October 1988 issue, photographer Donna Mitchell wrote a strikingly similar tale about Ponca City, Oklahoma. Read more…

A computer-generated rotation of the atrium at 41 Cooper Square

The moment people start talking about “paradigm shifts” in any profession, you can be sure there’s some big, disturbing change on its way. One thing was clear at last night’s “Shifting Paradigms: Design in Transition” event at the Center for Architecture, in New York: the digital age is about to hit architecture on the head with a knuckle duster. The proliferation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software has already changed the way architects communicate with builders and clients; now it may force design professionals to find new ways to validate their very existence. Read more…

This Wednesday night, PBS will premiere the newest installment of its American Masters series, I.M. Pei: Building China Modern. Last week, I caught a preview screening of the documentary, which traces the eight-year design and construction of Pei’s Suzhou Musuem, in China. Completed in 2006, the museum may have been Pei’s most challenging project to date. Not only was he attempting to capture the spirit and history of the 2,500-year-old city in a modern building, but he also had to deal with overly cautious Chinese government officials. Read more…

A teaser for the upcoming film Archiculture. The official trailer, which debuted in New York last night, will be available at a later date. (Teaser from arbuckle industries on Vimeo.)

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Last night, in the double-height space of the Center for Architecture’s basement, six panelists gathered to discuss the present and future of the profession in a conversation titled “Architecture Education vs. Professional Practice.” The roundtable discussion was inspired by the film Archiculture—a feature-length documentary by Ian Harris, who also moderated the discussion, and David Krantz—and it concluded with its trailer. (A catered party, with a DJ and live band followed.) Read more…

I’ll admit that I’m often guilty of writing off women’s lives before the 1960s as little more than marriage and childbirth, save for the rare anomaly. How bracing then to learn that anomalies were the norm at Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, starting in 1895 when he hired Marion Mahony as his first associate (she subsequently became the world’s first officially licensed female architect). Mahoney and five of the 100 women that worked with Wright are the subject of the short film A Girl is a Fellow Here (a phrase Wright is known to have used), which premiered last night at the Guggenheim. The film’s genesis was the moment when the director, Beverly Willis, discovered that Isabella Roberts, who has always been listed as a bookkeeper for the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, was actually an architect. It quickly became apparent that Frank Lloyd Wright, whose personal relationships with women were famously rather scandalous, was a progressive employer. Read more…

You know a film screening is going to be good when, in speaking about the event, the presenter refers to things like “this incredible document about civil engineering.” In Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, self-described “guerilla archivist” Rick Prelinger draws on his massive collection of home movies, educational and industrial films, and other ephemera. From promotional films of the building of the Bay Bridge to footage of the construction of the Twin Peaks tunnel to the home movies of the Ransohoff Family (their Union Square department store was featured in Vertigo), Prelinger collages a range of “unofficial documents” to explore the history and built environment of the City by the Bay. The aim, he says, is to investigate how “models of the past inform models of the future.” The Prelinger Archives, amassed by Prelinger over 20 years and sold to the Library of Congress in 2002, contains 48,000 complete films and roughly 30,000 cans of raw footage. Read more…

Having already cornered the market in films about typefaces, director Gary Hustwit has just announced that his next project will be a more hands-on affair. Objectified, a documentary on industrial design, “is about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them,” the film’s Web site says. Read more…

What better place to watch a documentary on Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s Beijing National Stadium—the so-called Bird’s Nest—than in the Hamptons, a stone’s throw from the site of their next big project, the new Parrish Art Museum? Next Tuesday’s New York premiere of Bird’s Nest—Herzog & de Meuron in China, by Christoph Schaub and Michael Schindhelm, will give Southampton audiences a preview of the 91,000-seat venue, set to open for the summer Olympics next month. Read more…