ARTE France
1) Nemausus I
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English
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Jean Nouvel's 1986 block of public housing apartments in Nîmes recalls an ocean liner - and turns social housing clichés on their heads. Nouvel used prefabricated industrial materials and concrete to keep costs down and allow him to build multilevel, spacious apartments, open to light and air. Despite the architect's requirement that the buildings remain examples of 1980s non-decorated, industrial architecture, the tenants have creatively individualized...
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Designed by the architects Jan Brickman and Leendert Van der Vlugt, supervised by Kees Van der Leuw, the boss of Van Nelle, the factory is the most important and the most accomplished example of industrial architecture in the modern movement. The result of a cross between Taylorism and Bauhaus, the Van Nelle factory at Rotterdam, built between 1926 and 1931, is a gigantic factory in which, up to the 80s, they processed tobacco, coffee and tea. Rather...
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The lounge chair designed by American husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames in 1956 has come to symbolize the affluent 1950s. The Eames wanted the chair to have "the warm receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt". But the chair also reflects the prevailing Cold-War mentality of 1950s America, which the Eames' designs and advertisements actively and naively fed into.
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As the French Revolution approached, Louise Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted the queen's portrait in an attempt to win back public opinion. This documentary examines the historical and social context in which Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France and Her Children was painted. It analyzes the work's composition and symbolism in terms of motherhood and political legitimacy, and attempts to counter the queen's reputation for debauchery....
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The SAS Royal Hotel tower marked Denmark's entry into post-war modernity. It is a major work that combines functionalism, simplicity and elegance, and in which everything, from the ashtrays to the building's volumes, were created and designed by Arne Jacobsen.The SAS terminal adjoined to the hotel has since been converted to other uses, and the communal areas of the hotel now attract a convention clientele, but Jacobsen's original meticulous design...
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Architect Kenzo Tange was one of the post-war leaders of the modern movement in Japan. The style of this movement includes structural elements being exposed on the outside of buildings, a lack of exterior design, and the use of construction materials. The Kofu building is emblematic both of the influence of the modern movement, and of the architectural ambitions of the Metabolist Movement which aspired to building mega-structures - freed from the...
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English
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North America is perpetually reinventing itself. The continent is also a wild world of rivers, plains and ice, where iridescent-colored deserts lie alongside luxuriant valleys and mountains holding many a secret. From the Far North to the Deserts of Utah, from the Rockies to Death Valley, the sites it features are on the scale of the continent itself. A Far North among the Earth's oldest; "Great Plains" born from the sea; a vast mountain in the middle...
9) Appollon
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Description
Although they were the son and daughter of Zeus, Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were born under threats from the goddess Hera. Zeus' wife Hera never forgave the twins' mother - the nymph Leto - for her union with the King of Mount Olympus, and she forced Leto into exile. As a result, Apollo was a wandering god, who did not grow up on Olympus. He was a musician and an excellent archer, and was both gentle and cruel. He was also very handsome, but...
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Ettore Sottsass designed the red plastic Valentine typewriter in 1969 for the modernist Italian firm Olivetti. Since 1958, Ettore Sottsass worked regularly with Olivetti, in exchange for total creative freedom. The Valentine was described by Olivetti as "a real pop object designed to blend into the private space." The typewriter had always been associated with the emancipation of women, but now the object itself was feminized. At once provocative...
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This film discusses the architecture behind the train shed and hotel at the Saint Pancras Station in London, built between 1855 and 1863. The hotel was a Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic statement in the ongoing battle in Victorian England between neo-Gothic and neoclassical. The train shed was William Barlow's creation; he created the world's widest and tallest ceiling.
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In 1995, the city of Luxembourg decided to have a large concert hall built on the Kirchberg plateau. The challenge for the architect was to associate three major public performance areas in the same complex, a large philharmonic hall, a chamber music auditorium and a space for discovery. The architect, Christian de Portzamparc made this hall into a great musical instrument. Elliptic in shape, the Philharmonie with its filter of white columns and colored...
13) Central America
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English
Description
Between North America and South America, the forces of the Earth have made way for the small area known as Central America and a tectonic plate: the Caribbean Plate. This plate is essentially a marine world. But at the confines of the territory, four vast masses are compressing, crushing and shaking this "paradise on earth". They are North and South America, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In addition, the creation of Panama allegedly solely...
14) The Siza School
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English
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Álvaro Siza Vieira, one of the greatest living architects, designed the buildings of the new faculty of architecture for the University of Porto, where he studied and continues to teach. The buildings that conform to the shape and natural setting of the site demonstrate the architect's modernist ideals of functionality, geometric design, architectural solutions to structural problems, organization and movement, and the variation of light according...
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A new place of culture, created in 2004, following the reconversion of a municipal venue and the abandonment of a political utopia. In the early 1970s, architect Jacques Kalisz was asked to build an administrative complex, grouping together under one roof a set of administrative, social and legal services (a court, a social security center, a police station, a tax center, a union headquarters, an unemployment pole, a morgue, kennels etc.). The Pantin...
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Hermes was the youngest of the Gods of Olympus. Right from birth, he was an insolent, thieving, trickster God. While still a baby, he escaped from the cave in which his mother Maia gave birth to him, and stole Apollo's herd. He subsequently invented the first lyre, which he offered him as a sign of reconciliation. Zeus admired the young God Hermes, and entrusted him with several missions: to become a messenger, to become an intercessor between the...
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Africa may seem to be a young continent, as it has only been explored in its entirety since the 19th century. It was the first continent to be inhabited by man, 2 million years ago, and yet the African continent was born during the earth's infancy. After having experienced a violent cataclysm of cosmic origin, Africa found itself trapped in the middle of the other continents. Then, jostled by its neighbours for millions of years, it finally broke...
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Description
The iMac is the most widely sold computer in the world. The release of the colored, egg-shaped, transparent and user-friendly iMac computer by Apple in 1998 came as a bombshell in the computing market. Through pictures from past records, 3D animations showing computers of the future and works of contemporary artists, this film tells us with humor and originality how design has influenced the austere world of computing.
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English
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Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Center is spaceship like structure located between downtown Wolfsburg and the VW Autostadt. A great concrete and glass triangle, the project satisfies two ambitions: for Hadid, it is one of her first major works; and for the city, it is a statement of identity in the face of Volkswagen's powerful tax base. Built on large cone bases housing museum reception, café, and gift shop areas, the main exhibition hall contains 250...
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Description
In 1871 a huge fire ravaged Chicago. It was a unique opportunity for a generation of young American architects to break away from European forms and think up the new shapes of a typically American style of architecture. The Chicago Auditorium Building (1887-1889) is considered as the main work of Adler & Sullivan. It is a mixed program which houses a monumental auditorium with excellent acoustics, offices and a hotel facing the lake. At the time,...