Top picks for the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival

As many of you hopefully already know, the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival is starting today at Rialto Cinemas Newmarket in Auckland (until May 21), before opening at The Embassy in Wellington (May 29 to June 11) and at Rialto Cinemas Dunedin (June 12-22).

You can download a PDF of the programme here. And you can book tickets here. (Wellingtonians: please note you should use the link to the Event Cinemas website).

Over the next few days we'll tell you our picks from the festival lineup - all the films are tantalising, but we've got to be in the office some of the time, so we'll tell you which movies are at the top of our lists. 

Here are some of HOME editor Jeremy Hansen's picks:

"I'm crazy about the work of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese firm SANAA, especially after going to see their Museum of 21st Century Art in  Kanazawa a few years ago (do you like how I dropped that in?). So I'm really excited about seeing The Interior Passage, a documentary about the making of their Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland (left), an incredible-looking building that creates its own kind of terrain. It also sounds like the documentary is an interesting look at the pressures of creating such an avant-garde building, and how architectural vision gets tested by the realities of budget pressures and engineering challenges."



"I saw If You Build It (that's the trailer above) at the festival opening night, and although it wouldn't quite have made my original list, it was fantastic and really uplifting and I think everyone should see it. In it, two designers take over the workshop programme at a high school in a downtrodden country in North Carolina, and lead their students on a fantastic journey that has a heart-warming and lasting effect on the entire town. Lots of people in the audience were crying, as it's impossible not to be moved by this film. 



"I can never see too much of the work of the great modernist architect Richard Neutra, and this documentary, The Oyler House: Richard Neutra's Desert Retreat, (trailer above) which focuses one on of his lesser-known homes, looks irresistible. It's just 48 minutes long, so it screens with Desert Utopia: Midcentury Architecture in Palm Springs - a double-bill that's sure to satiate even the most ravenous modernists.

"I'm also excited about seeing the documentary about the great Japanese architect Tadao Ando: From Emptiness to Infinity because Ando's works are so fantastic, and any insight into how he creates them has got to be a good thing.




"And while it isn't about architecture, the idea of a fashion documentary featuring Givenchy, Dior, Ungaro, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin along with Andy Warhol, Christina Onassis, Liza Minnelli, Josephine Baker and Rudolf Nureyev all getting together for an epic fashion show at Versailles just sounds too amazing to be true. The film's called Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution and pits the French against American designers including Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein and Bill Blass. It looks like the kind of thing that anyone interested in fashion should see."  

Architect Amanda Levete is coming to New Zealand

We're delighted to announce that the Stirling Prize-winning London architect Amanda Levete will travel to New Zealand be the international member of our Home of the Year 2014 jury. She will give lectures in Auckland (on Monday March 10) and Christchurch (on Wednesday March 12) about her remarkable work. Tickets to the lectures can be purchased here. We're grateful for the support of Altherm Window Systems, our Home of the Year sponsor, whose generosity has made Amanda's visit possible.  

Amanda Levete in her London office. Photograph by Peter Guenzel.

HOME editor Jeremy Hansen met Levete at her office in London last June. Here's his profile of her from the current issue of the magazine:

Amanda Levete almost didn’t become an architect. Expelled from school for sunbathing naked on the roof when she should have been at biology class, she had no idea what she was going to do next. “I got so embarrassed that all my friends were going to university that I did an A-level in art and art history and a foundation year at art school,” she told Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian. “That’s when architecture came across my radar, and when it did, I realised that I work best when I’m doing something creatively, but have a boundary to push.”

Levete (pronounced Lev-eet) has been pushing boundaries to create remarkable buildings ever since. For 20 years she was one-half of the innovative firm Future Systems with her then-husband, the late Jan Kaplický. Together they designed the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground, a curvaceous pod of white aluminium that almost bankrupted them but then won the 1999 Stirling Prize, Britain’s most prestigious architecture award. Their subsequent design for Birmingham’s Selfridges store, a swoop of a building covered in circular aluminium discs, was hailed as a symbol of the city’s regeneration. Kaplicky stormed out of the Selfridges opening because the finished structure wasn’t as pure as their original design. Levete was more pragmatic. “I don’t devalue the power of conceptual thinking, but for me the thrill of architecture is to see your ideas realised – to struggle against the problems out there and overcome them,” she told Jeffries.  

An aerial rendering of what the EDP Cultural Centre in Lisbon will look like on completion.

A rendering of the EDP Foundation Cultural Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, designed by Amanda Levete Architects and currently under construction.
 

The EDP Cultural Centre is a dramatic swoop on the Tagus River with a rooftop walkway.

A rendering of the cultural centre's exterior and its
specially designed tiles.

Levete and Kaplicky had a son, Josef, but divorced in 2006 – “a very public falling out,” according to  Levete. Kaplicky, who was Czech, died in Prague in 2009 at the age of 71, just after visiting his second wife, Eliska, and their newborn daughter in hospital. He and Levete had continued working together after their divorce, but had agreed to separate their architectural practice four months before his death, which is when Levete established Amanda Levete Architects.

Anyone who wondered if she had been riding on the coattails of Kaplický’s genius (a word Levete uses to describe him) has since been thoroughly silenced. In 2011, Levete won an international competition to build an extension to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The 1,500-square-metre gallery for temporary exhibitions will be the biggest new art space in London since the Tate Modern; the project also involves the design of a new entry to the building from Exhibition Road. An earlier scheme by Daniel Libeskind was abandoned seven years earlier after encountering a storm of public option. “It was an iconic building, but the time for iconic buildings has passed,” Levete told The Guardian. Her design is currently under construction.

A rendering of Amanda Levete Architects' competition-winning scheme for a new entry and gallery space for London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Another rendering of the V&A project, which features a courtyard connected to Exhibition Road.

 

Two views of the new subterranean gallery spaces that are
currently under construction at the V&A.

Other major projects are nearing completion: a waterfront cultural centre in Lisbon that reads as a dramatic bulge in the landscape; a shimmering high-rise hotel and shopping centre in Bangkok which Levete will attend the opening of on her way home from helping to choose our 2014 Home of the Year. She has also designed furniture for London’s Established & Sons and writes regularly about architecture, design and urbanism for The New Statesman (you can read her articles here). Her office, a non-descript semi-industrial building in London’s northeast, now employs more than 50 staff, who pad around on the immaculate space’s bright carpet in socks (the office’s no-shoe office rule means you are greeted by an archipelago of footwear when you arrive at reception).  

Two views of Amanda Levete's London home, photographed by Gidon Fuehrer.

This will be Levete’s first visit to New Zealand. Her husband Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, will accompany her. She has already reviewed the entries in the 2014 Home of the Year with us, and will help choose a winner when we visit the shortlisted homes in person. 

First impressions? This year’s entrants are notable for their “modesty in scale and materials and technology, and within that they’re searching for something quite profound and poetic,” she says. That seems promising.

We’re looking forward to showing her the best New Zealand homes of the past year. Please come along to Levete's Auckland and Christchurch lectures: it’s a rare chance to hear a remarkable talent reveal more about her remarkable work.

Preview: The Art Issue 2014

Our annual Art Issue is always one of our favourites, and we're especially delighted with the way this year's extravaganza has worked out. There are plenty of highlights, including New Zealand jewellery designer Jessica McCormack's remarkable London townhouse, which features in the the beautiful shot by James MacDonald that stars on our cover.

There's much more to see inside. HOME editor Jeremy Hansen visited Jessica in London last June, and details her stellar career - her jewellery designs have been worn by Rihanna and Madonna, and she has a list of well-heeled clients from all over the world. She's also a dab hand at creating an art-filled interior, as you'll see in our pages.

Another rising star in this issue is New Zealand artist Simon Denny, who won the prestigious Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2012, and has been selected as New Zealand's representative at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015. Photographer Steffen Jagenburg visited Simon (below) at his home and studio in Berlin, and took some marvellous shots. 

And there's more New Zealand artistic talent that we've tracked down offshore: our Art Issue features Fiona Connor at home in Los Angeles, a former shop in the Echo Park neighbourhood that she also uses as a studio for her sculptures (one of which is the outdoor lounge chair in this photo by Emily Andrews below). Fiona has a fascinating art practice that we're really delighted to tell you more about in this issue. 

Many of you will know 'Wind Tree', the fantastic sculpture in Auckland's Silo Park (if you don't, here it is, photographed by Simon Devitt).

'Wind Tree' was not created specifically for Silo Park, but for another Auckland site in the 1970s. It spent about a decade in storage after being removed from QEII Square to make way for the Britomart redevelopment. We tracked down Michio Ihara, the remarkable artist who created it, at his home near Boston. Gemma Gracewood has written a touching story for this issue about Ihara-san's illustrious artistic career, and Emily Andrews took beautiful photographs like this one below of his home and studio. 

Another highlight from this issue is the New York home of Bill Shumaker (below), a one-time New Zealander whose Brooklyn brownstone is bursting at the seams with his idiosyncratic art collection. Emily Andrews also took the photos, and writer Sam Eichblatt's story in our Art Issue details Bill's fascinating life story. 

There's much more in the issue of course. It's on newsstands from Monday February 3.

Our new book: great New Zealand modernist homes

We're so pleased with our new book, Modern: New Zealand Homes from 1938 to 1977, which we've created in conjunction with the kind folks at Random House publishers. It'll be in bookstores from November 1, but we wanted to tell you a bit about it here before it comes out. 

The book's jacket features a photograph by Patrick Reynolds of a home designed by Reginald Uren in Raumati in the mid-1960s. When you get your copy, you'll see the jacket (like the rest of the book, designed by our friends at Inhouse) folds out to reveal a bigger view of the house.

Under the jacket lies this foxy linen cover with embossed lettering. Yum. 

The book, which has 350 pages between its gorgeous covers, is a compliation of features of our favourite mid-century homes from the magazine in the last decade or so, with the addition of some that have been newly photographed for the book. The shot below is of a spread from the book featuring the Donner House, designed by Auckland's City Architect, Tibor Donner. It was photographed by Mark Smith and styled by Katie Lockhart.

There are 24 homes in the book, modernist gems from Auckland, Hamilton, Thames, Whanganui, Hawke's Bay, Raumati, Wellington, Christchurch, Hokitika, Dunedin and Alexandra. All of them show mid-century New Zealand as a place of great sophistication and inventiveness. Most of the homes are still in marvellously good condition, as liveable today as they were when they were first completed - including Wellington's Halberstam House (below), designed by Henry Kulka and still occupied by Lucie Halberstam, the daughter of the original owners. This photo is by Paul McCredie. 

The book also features homes designed by, among others, Ernst Plischke, Bill Alington, Robin Simpson, Vladimir Cacala, John Scott, Ivan Juriss, Ted McCoy, Jon Craig, and Sir Miles Warren, whose magnificent Selby (below, photographed by Paul McCredie) near Havelock North features along with a home Sir Miles designed in Dunedin that has been shot especially for the book.

We're including the shot below just to make it clear that this isn't just a picture book. In fact, it includes the work of some of the country's best architectural writers from HOME's family of contributors, including Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Julia Gatley, Linda Tyler, Adrienne Rewi, Lara Strongman, Andrew Barrie, Bill McKay, Michael Findlay, Alistair Luke and Claire McCall. 

There are also plans of almost every house, and helpful biographies of the architects involved. 

One of the many nice things about the book is the way it traces modernism's development in New Zealand from textbook flat-roofed homes to later experiments in combining European modernism with this country's cottage vernacular, where homes such as Jon Craig's near Wellington (below, photographed by Paul McCredie) combined pitched roofs with open-plan living rooms. 

We're pleased to be able to offer the book for the special price of $70 (RRP is $75) including postage, from www.magshop.co.nz/modern. You can pre-order your copy there now. We really hope you enjoy it. 

California Design - an interview with co-curator Bobbye Tigerman

The epitome of California style: The Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, designed by Richard Neutra in 1946.
Photo by Julius Shulman, 1947.© J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute.

Design aficionados, pay attention: starting this Saturday, Auckland Art Gallery plays host to California Design: Living in a Modern Way, a major (and majorly successful) show that originated from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It showcases the best of a golden and globally influential period in California design and architecture, and we can’t wait to see it. HOME editor Jeremy Hansen talked to the exhibition’s co-curator, Bobbye Tigerman, about the show (this interview is also featured in our current issue of the magazine).

HOME First of all, some context: what is California design to you – and what was going on in California at the time that created the energy that this show encapsulates?
BOBBYE TIGERMAN, CO-CURATOR The California Design show we organised [co-curated with Wendy Kaplan] covers the years from 1930 to 1965. This was a time of incredible innovation and extraordinary growth in California. The population grew significantly with the Depression, when people were looking for jobs, and with the onset of World War Two a lot of industries were located in northern and southern California. You had a huge population of educated people coming here and they all needed a place to live. There was a big demand for new home construction and, as a result, there was a lot of opportunity for new design and architecture. There was this widespread recognition that California was a place where things were possible: the rules could be bent and even broken. It drew a lot of very creative people who did a lot of interesting things during that time.

What made you want to do the show?
When Wendy and I realised that there had never been a show on the subject we were kind of shocked. We knew it was important to do and do quickly because so many of the artists were still alive and we could talk to them and capture their stories. The show turned out to be wildly popular — we had 363,000 visitors, making it the fifth most-attended show at LACMA.

The show draws on examples of architecture, design and craft. What do these sometimes disparate occupations have in common?
Including both design and craft was an easy choice, as the designers of the era didn’t really make distinctions between them. We started off thinking we’d focus on design for the home, but we quickly realised we were going to have to break our rules and include fashion, jewellery, and graphic design, because they were so compelling and so connected to the other designers and industries. We were trying to reflect the era.

Why has this period of design remained so influential and potent to this day?
I struggle with this question a lot. I think there are a couple of reasons. One is I think we have a nostalgia for a time – even if we didn’t live through the post-war era – when there was a lot of opportunity, the ability to achieve the good life. It seemed much more possible then than it does today. I think aesthetically it’s very simple and clean; it was always meant to be futuristic and it’s still the future, so if you’re interested in being a modern person it still has those connotations. It’s still widely available, it’s not wildly expensive.

Almost all the items in the show could be characterised as possessing a certain sense of optimism. What’s happened to that optimism? Does California still possess that cultural primacy?
The show ends in 1965 – the design industry changed rather drastically around that time, so that kind of design community that existed in the post-war years is no longer there. I think if you want to identify what California design means in the latter part of the 20th century it would be hardware and software focused in Silicon Valley. It’s now literally changing how everybody lives and interacts with each other. It’s different, but I think the region still has broad influence.

What’s your own place like?
I live in an apartment building that was built around 1948 or so. I do like mid-century design, and I have some things from the era in my house, but I try not to make it a time capsule.

For more information and to purchase discounted early-bird tickets to California Design: Living in a Modern Way, visit the Auckland Art Gallery's website here. The show opens Saturday July 6 and runs until September 29.

The last two finalists on Campbell Live

Here's the link to Campbell Live's footage from last night of the last two houses in this year's award.

Remaining finalists for Home of the Year unveiled - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News

We're announcing the winner of the Home of the Year award (and the BMW EfficientDynamics Sustainability Award) tonight at a function in Auckland. We'll post details on this site tonight, too.

Looking back at last year's award

If you're looking at David Mitchell and Julie Stout's house that is a finalist in this year's Home of the Year award in our earlier post, you might also like to check out their winning design from last year, the Home of the Year 2009 on Waiheke Island.

Waiheke retreat wins Home of the Year 2009 - Video Archive - Video - 3 News

This footage was screened on TV3's Sunrise breakfast programme, which we miss... it was shut down earlier this year.

Home of the Year - Part Two - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News

Part two of Campbell Live's coverage of the Home of the Year judging process was on TV3 last night - the story is at this link:

Home of the Year - Part Two - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News

There is one more episode of the judging journey to go to air before we announce the winner on Thursday July 27. And remember, the Home of the Year issue of the magazine is on newsstands August 2. Stay tuned!

Home of the Year - Part One - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News

Last night TV3's Campbell Live played the first of their coverage of the finalists in the Home of the Year award (we'll be announcing the winner at a function on the evening of July 29), proudly presented in conjunction with our partner BMW.

Campbell Live have been great supporters of the award for many years now, but this year they did things a little differently, following the judges (New York's Charles Renfro, Auckland's Ken Crosson, and me) on their journey around the country to see the homes. First up, two homes by Daniel Marshall on Waiheke Island.

Home of the Year - Part One - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News

All these homes will be published in our Home of the Year issue, on newsstands August 2.

The villa

A little self-promotion here, but those of you who are interested in architecture may also be interested in the book Villa, which I worked on with Patrick Reynolds and Jeremy Salmond. In it, we've celebrated the adaptability and diversity of occupation of this uniquely New Zealand building form, visiting, photographing and writing about 20 villas from Dunedin to Hokianga. All the homes have been photographed by Patrick, who came up with the idea for the book after renovating his own villa, which is featured on our October/November cover. Here's the book cover if you're interested in looking out for it. The book is published by Random House, and I've vowed never to do another one at the same time as my full-time job.

Mokum blogs HOME

A little shout-out to our friends at Mokum Textiles, the Sydney design studio with big New Zealand connections. They've made mention of HOME, and NZ design in general, on their blog.

http://studio98.mokumtextiles.com/