Jan 7, 2019
Every fall, the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) premieres the best new documentaries of the year. Host George Smart was on the scene talking with the people behind the new movies.
Ultan Guilfoyle’s award-winning films have been shown on PBS and HBO in the US and the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 in the UK. He is author of two books about design, and with Sydney Pollack, Guilfoyle produced Sketches of Frank Gehry. His latest film is Frank Gehry: Building Justice where architect Gehry, philanthropist George Soros, and students at SCI-ARC and Yale re-design prison architecture for the complex social, political, racial, and aesthetic issues behind incarceration.
Paul Clemence is co-producer with Aksel Stasny of the film Two Pianos. His book on Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House remains the most complete photo documentation of that iconic design, and his many photographs have appeared in Metropolis, ArchDaily, Architizer, Casa Vogue Brasil, and his own blog Archi-photo with nearly 1M followers worldwide. Two Pianos is about the Italian architect Renzo Piano, and the film captures the masterful use of light, carefully orchestrated relationship between inside and outside, the seamless connection to the surroundings, and an exacting craftsmanship.
Alan Hess is an architect and author who has shed light on many forgotten and neglected styles of postwar American modernist architecture. The Los Angeles Conservancy named him "The preeminent authority on Southern California Modernism." Host George Smart named him the Samuel L. Jackson of architecture documentaries, because like the prolific Mr. Jackson in film, Alan has appeared in more documentaries for design than anyone else. Hess is one of the stars in a Jake and Tracey Gorst documentary on architect Albert Frey, the first American to work for French superstar architect Le Corbusier, in the film Frey Part I, The Architectural Envoy.