Architects and Artisans

Back in 1995, Hirosuke Kitamura came to a fork in the road of his professional career. “I wanted to learn either hair design or photography,” the Japanese/Brazilian artist says.  “I wanted to do something special, something high-tech.” He chose photography – in Brazil.   And on Feb. 1, his work will be on display at 1500 Gallery [...]

Carlos Carcas is an independent filmmaker based in Madrid. Born in Miami, Florida in 1968, he began working in film production after graduating from Boston Universityʼs College of Communication. In 2009, he co-directed “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?” about the life and work of British architect Norman Foster, which premiered in February [...]

Filmmaker Laura Israel isn’t tilting at windmills – but she does want to cast a critical eye in their direction. And she’s done that with “Windfall” – her first documentary film, art directed within an inch of its life – and one that delivers a profound message: Look before you leap into wind power. “People who are [...]

Perhaps no Southern city ever found its fate so entwined with the Arts & Crafts movement as did Asheville, N.C. Its moderate summers appealed to tourists from the South and its short winters were a balm to their counterparts up North. A visiting George Vanderbilt liked the area so much that he bought 125,000 untamed nearby [...]

Truly one of the giants in post-World War II experimental photography, Jerry Uelsmann perfected the art of combining negatives in the darkroom to create new compositions. “He took a different tack – that the negative didn’t have to be the departure point,” says Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography.  He’s currently pulling together [...]

Chattanooga-based artist Daryl Thetford’s work has evolved in the past six years, from photographs of vintage southern Americana like juke joints, Mississippi Delta scenes and roadside attractions, into mixed media informed by his own language of signs and billboards. It’s as though he’s still gathering information as he’s photographing the grit and rust of urban [...]

Jim Berger was 12 years old in 1956 when he put pencil to paper, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked a favor. He had a paper route, he said, and hoped that the architect might design for Eddie, his black Lab, a house “which would be easy to build and would go with our house.”  His father had commissioned Wright [...]

Sometimes, adversity stimulates a sharper focus. That’s certainly the case with the new 57,000 square foot campus center at Molloy College on Long Island, designed by BRB Architects. They started out designing a 75,000 square foot building in 2005, only to get tangled up first in environmental reviews, and then in the market crash of late [...]

Underwritten with part of a $100 million gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the Poetry Foundation embarked in 2007 on a journey to establish a home for poetry at the intersection of Superior and Dearborn in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Proposals from 50 architecture firms were winnowed down to six, then to three, then two – [...]

In his third film in a decade, documentary filmmaker Chad Freidrichs has tackled one of the most well-known failures of post-war modern architecture in American society. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” opening on Friday, Jan 20 at the IFC Center in Manhattan, explores the hugely mistaken idea that our built environment could somehow influence and cure a [...]