Ah, the Roaring Twenties, that decadent period when people tossed tradition out the window and really started living it up. Opulent parties, smokey jazz clubs, subterranean speakeasies—if only we could have been there! The auto, radio, and movie industries were flourishing; the literary world was on fire; and the fashion industry was going bonkers (what’s more fabulous than a slinky flapper dress?). Architecture was also having a glorious moment. Art Deco emerged as the era’s defining style, characterized by bold geometries and dramatic flourishes. It extended into the 1930s and ’40s and then faded after World War II.

Tomorrow, the latest film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in 1922, debuts in theaters. To celebrate, we’ve rounded up 15 magnificent examples of Art Deco design around the globe. Click through to see them all!

(Top): Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton from the new film, “The Great Gatsby.” (Above) Grand ballroom from the film. Photos: Warner Bros. via Architectural Digest 

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OK, we’re going to be completely honest here: We really don’t know much about the North Pole. I mean, besides that the icy tundra is slowly moving due to melting ice caps (sad) —oh, and that contrary to popular belief, there are no penguins (true!). But we kinda prefer it that way. After all, isn’t in way more fun to believe the North Pole is a magical land complete with candy-coated architecture and workshops full of toys—the way it’s depicted in the classic Rudolph TV special or in Will Ferrell’s Elf? Come to think of it, almost everything we do know about the North Pole comes from the movies. We’ve rounded up five different visions of the arctic outpost from some of our favorite holiday films.  Click through to see them all, and be sure to share your own favorites in the comments.

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Now if that headline doesn’t grab your attention, can we assume that nothing will? Inspired by the world of B movies, which are often filled with girls, guns, and explosives, creative director Anna Burns and photographer Thomas Brown used umbrellas to construct a series of kinetic installations that star in their quirky, 3-minute flick POP POP BANG. We promise, you don’t want to miss this one. Click through to see the film!

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AMO/Prada – “Real Fantasies Fall/Winter 2012″

AMO, OMA’s research and propaganda wing, has realized a bizarre new video preview for Prada’s 2012 fall and winter collections. Set in a dystopian future of space and architectural fragments, “Real Fantasies” is a stunning piece of advertising, visually reminiscent of the work of groups such as Archigram and Superstudio.

AMO and Prada have a long-standing collaboration, marking one of the most successful crossovers between architecture and fashion. See some stills from the film below.

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De Rotterdam Complex, NL: Workers from tomas koolhaas on Vimeo.

The first thing one notices of Tomas Koolhaas’s newest short film—really a clip, taken from Rem, his full length feature about his father—is the conspicuous absence of our central protagonist. Apart from a brief glimpse of Rem (in hard hat) surfacing from the depths of OMA’s on-going ‘De Rotterdam‘ project to survey the prospective horizon, the architect is entirely missing from the proceedings. Instead, Koolhaas the filmmaker chooses to frame the toil of the complex’s builders in an effort to capture the “raw condition[s]” of the construction site—articulated here as both gritty work (concrete pouring, paving, spraying) and the kinship that forms from shared back-breaking labor.

The clip juxtaposes the moody, yet frank footage against a frenetic score of wheezy syncopated beats, which accurately conveys the electric staccato of the building site while muting all of its unfocused clamor. Taken together with the previous two snippets Koolhaas has released, it’s clear that the polished production and pointed critique of the finished film will be a far cry from the quiet, sentimental poignancy associated with the architect-”biodoc”, as best exemplified by Nathanial Kahn’s My Architect. Needless to say, we’re excited.

Architizer caught up with Tomas Koolhaas to ask him about the project and what it’s like to accompany his father to work. Click through for the interview.

De Rotterdam complex; Rendering: OMA

De Rotterdam complex under construction

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Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.

If you’re a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s films, you’ll know of the filmmaker’s penchant for one-point perspective, a framing device in which the field of view is symmetrical, compressed into a near-static horizontal tableau. Vimeo user Kogonada has compiled the best of these wide-angle shots from several of Kubrick’s masterworks, including The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Kubrick // One-Point Perspective” follows Kogonada’s previous video essays–see his studies on Wes Anderson’s top-down perspective or Breaking Bad‘s kinetic p.o.v. shots–which set a film or auteur’s stylistic ticks in apposition to each other in a demonstrative manner. Continue.

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KSAT Svalbard Ground Station; All photographs: Greg White

A self-identified “frustrated architect”, George Lucas has, in fact, built much more than most architects, constructing not only physical (and thoroughly reformist) buildings, but entirely visionary landscapes, urban environments, and entire worlds whose influence hold sway to this day. A fundamental feature of Lucas’s architectural mise-en-scènes is the filmmaker’s concept of “used spaces”, the deliberate scuffing of walls and the battering of structural lattices that register human usage and occupation and bear the marks of the gravitational or other atmospheric forces that cohere these strange lands together. This is perhaps most evident in the white purist terrain of Hoth, who pristine, even abstract forms are blemished by the Rebellion’s grey, fuel-leaking fuselage and arsenal (and the frozen bodies of fallen tauntauns). Photographer Greg White works against this, reverting to the aesthetic biases of early Sci-fi moviescapes which privileged stark, blank urban forms and architectural corridors that were themselves purified of inhabitants and, thus, loaded with techno-utopian moments.

White takes as his subject the data centers and technological infrastructure behind the finger swipes and pop-up notifications of contemporary life, capturing mechanistic environments such as the KSAT Svalbard Ground Station, theMcLaren Technology Centre, and the BMW MINI Factory. Each is rendered in minimalist compositions, white washed tableaux whose near depthless forms are made legible by shadow and line. Continue.

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Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

By most accounts, Alfred Hitchock’s 1954 classic Rear Window is as perfectly constructed a  film as any the medium has ever produced. It is a “purely cinematic film”, as Hitchcock later described it, whose obvious spatial handicaps both exploited and negated one of the camera’s preeminent virtues, its effortless ability to navigate between the proximal and distal. The plot is well-known: world-weary photographer, wheelchair-bound Jeff (Jimmy Stewart…you’ve seen this movie, right?) is confined to recuperative leave in his Greenwich Village apartment with only (or mostly)  a panorama of the encompassing tenement complex beyond as his company. But as Jean-Luc Godard commented, one never recalls the particulars of any of Hitchcock’s narratives, but, rather, only the shots that framed them. In the case of Rear Window, however, neither specific scenes nor shots prove more memorable than the architecture and spatial configuration of the famed courtyard set. These have been analysed to the point of exhaustion, with the chief exegetic points  being well familiar to any casual student of cinema, but never have they been seen before like this video timelapse.

Meticulously assembled by Jeff Desom, using just After Effects and Photoshop, the video condenses Hitchcock’s masterwork into 3 breathtaking minutes in which the entirety of the film’s events–sans the dramatic, personal scenes between the protagonists–play out before Jeff’s gaze. Desom’s collage is completely comprised of footage from the film, with the iconic window panorama being neatly tailored and augmented with various photographic effects (tilt-shift, stabilization, “rain”) so as to achieve verisimilitude with the original and to re-create the environmental changes that propel the narrative along. “Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle,” Desom writes, “I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions.” The video is part of an expanded visual installation entitled “Rear Window Loop“.

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100 Yen: The Teaser Trailer from Strata Studios on Vimeo.

For those outside of it, Japanese culture can seem impenetrable, like an enclosed terrarium that breeds fascinating, inexplicable visions, ideas, and customs. And within it, one will find an even more insular subculture, one centered around the steadfast phenomenon of Japanese video games. Subculture can hardly be used to describe the cult of the Japanese arcade, which is the subject of a new documentary called 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience. Producer Brad Crawford burrows deep into downtown Tokyo, where five story buildings filled with arcade cabinets extend their neon signs outward and tower over the narrow streets. “Welcome to Japan,” the film’s Indie GoGo campaign explains, “a place where the arcades of the 80s and 90s not only exist but thrive and have evolved into an elaborate, unmatched gaming experience.”

The trailer gives a glimpse of sights we may have seen before: a line of Japanese youth, seated stationary before a row of arcade cabinets; a duo moving effortlessly on a neon platform to a manic display of light and sound; a gamer crammed into a booth, eyes fixed on a screen while fingers coordinate joystick movements and button-mashing. Meanwhile a voiceover tells us in Japan, “it’s not fun; it’s our life to be the best.” We were particularly intrigued by the teaser’s peek into the architecture of Japanese arcades: “As you get more involved with games, you’ll find yourself heading higher and higher in the arcade. That’s essentially how the arcades are designed,” another voiceover explains. Looks like this documentary may take us to the top floor.

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For those of you still reeling from the Oscars last night (we laughed, we cried), here’s a wonderful video that places four contemporary buildings in Veneto, Italy in the same cinematic splendor as some of the brightest stars to have received that coveted golden statuette. Watch as Tadao Ando’s Factory, Silvia Dainese’s Black Cube, Massimiliano Fuksas‘s Nardini Bull, and Daniel Libeskind’s 9/11 Memorial come to life in this short film, which celebrates each building’s dramatic play with light. Set to scintillating instrumentals, ‘Luce/Light’ guides us through the spaces, allowing us to observe the details and soak in the emotive qualities of each masterful architectural performance.

Luce/Light from Studio-due on Vimeo.

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