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A film festival highlights the proliferation of design documentaries. For years, documentaries on architecture have ­appeared mainly on public broadcasting stations in the form of earnest presentations of buildings and their pioneering creators. Often they are too earnest. But a number of factors indicate vibrant growth and change. Perhaps the accessibility of video cameras allows more architecturally minded novices to turn from amateurs to auteurs. Add to that the proliferation of short trailers or film excerpts on YouTube and such online outlets, and architecture on film seems to be everywhere. Photo © John F. Turner (above) TOP: Nicknamed “The Blob,“

A Vision by Peter Greenaway at the Park Avenue Armory You had to be there. A hyperbolic production that fuses the hokey theatricality of “son et lumière” (sound and light) tourist attractions with the razzle-dazzle antics of Cirque du Soleil was on view at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City until January 6, 2011. Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, a kitschy, multimedia spectacular (kitschtacular?), is basically a photographic reconstitution of da Vinci’s famous fresco, punched up by films, lighting, music, and voice-overs. Masterminded by Greenaway, the Welsh-born impresario, filmmaker, and artist (with a strong interest

If a client asks you to imitate yourself, is that the sincerest form of flattery? If you ever think that the architecture business has gotten too tough, you can always lay down your mouse, pick up a guitar, and go into pop music. Architects are problem solvers, right? The best make their livings predicting what people need and what will appeal to them. They produce materials lists and instruction sheets, then contractors follow them, a ribbon is cut, and euphoria ensues. illustration © Norman Hathaway So it shouldn’t be too hard for us to figure out which noises will inoculate

For architects on the edge, early success can be a sword that cuts both ways. Every aspiring architect dreams of a breakthrough project that will establish his or her name soon enough to buy time and offset the geological pace of a creative process often calculated in decades rather than years. Photo © Norman Mcgrath/Esto (top); Wayne Andrews/Esto (above) This house and studio on Long Island for his parents set Charles Gwathmey on the path to success (top). Condominium 1 at Sea Ranch was a highlight in Charles Moore’s career (above). But as the career tangents of even the most

For architects on the edge, early success can be a sword that cuts both ways. Early adulation can morph into a fearsome burden, the “how-do-I-top-myself?” syndrome that frequently shadows exceptional success. Sometimes external factors interject a negative answer to that question. Shifting trends in taste thwarted the prospects of several early-20th-century vanguard architects, including Louis Sullivan, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, C.F.A. Voysey, and the Greene brothers, all of whom were labeled old hat when a resurgent vogue for Beaux-Arts Classicism — which Sullivan foresaw at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — reared its neo-Roman head. Photo courtesy Collection Nai, Rotterdam Public

I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.

Never the same shot Golf is also like architecture in that there are no cookie-cutter plans, or at least no good ones. Unlike bowling or tennis, golf is played on a surface in which every course, every fairway, every green is different. In a lifetime, you never play exactly the same shot twice. Isn’t that part of what makes the practice of architecture, too, so fascinating? Mark Twain should have tried golf. He might have come up with something to rival John Updike’s marvelous short story “Farrell’s Caddie,” in which a wizened caddie steers a callow American golfer around a

I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.

Earlier this year, I was in the Emirates to give a lecture and was invited to visit the school of architecture where one of my hosts taught. Segregated by gender, the place was a Foucault fantasy made concrete. On one side of the building lay the studios and classrooms for women students and on the other — in mirror image — the rooms for the men. Between them were faculty offices, all of which had two doors, one to each side. The dean — natty in Armani — explained to me (as if the whole thing made sense) that the

There are some small signs of movement, especially in the stirrings of fungibility on the part of planning and landscape. Although I run a program in urban design, I have a fundamental disbelief in any unitary discourse of the city and try to offer access to many. Originally conceived as a way of recuperating physical design from a planning profession that had fallen in thrall to the social sciences, urban design is often taught simply as big building and fixates excessively on historic patterns. But urbanism’s most desperate needs devolve on the new morphologies of sustainability and equity that an