One Millionth Tower

Web Documentary by Katerina Cizek

Canadian filmmaker Katerina Cizek’s latest interactive documentary, which explores issues around residential high-rises, has garnered a great deal of press recently. Wired.com waxed enthusiastically about its innovative use of a new 3‑D interface developed by Mozilla Foundation called Popcorn, a web tool considered as revolutionary to film as the hyperlink was to online text. While it’s a high-tech marvel, One Millionth Tower, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, also poses a new approach to solving issues surrounding urban decay. It’s composed of interactive projects and short documentaries, one of which zeroes in on a residential tower on the outskirts of Toronto. Unnamed and indistinguishable from its neighbours, it symbolizes the millions of others found in any city around the world.

Employing fast-moving images and animated overlays, the documentary explores how community action can make a difference. Residents of the tower worked with a local firm, ERA Architects, to find ways for improving their home. They came up with plans for bringing fresh food kiosks and sidewalk cafés to the ground level while setting up an on-site day care and retrofitting a parking lot into a basketball court with bleachers.

Unfortunately, this watch-only segment doesn’t enrich the urban renewal dialogue beyond obvious solutions. “World of Highrises,” though, is a different story. This interactive portion makes full use of Popcorn. Click on the Play menu, choose a country from a list, and you are swiftly beamed down, via Google Earth, to a high-rise district within the selected country. Information from Wikipedia and Flickr adds to the experience. Of course, data is richer in London than in, say, Windhoek, Namibia, but the piece reveals how urban decay is everyone’s problem. There are a million stories in the high-rise city.  You may also like: Katerina Cizek’s earlier web project, Out My Window, a preamble to One Millionth Tower. Viewable online (at interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow), the 90-minute documentary records stories from high-rise tenants in 13 cities.  By Alex Bozikovic

   ISBN N/A

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Project Japan: Metabolism Talks...

Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Two of Europe’s most engaging minds have spent untold hours compiling material on a group of Japanese architects led by Kenzo Tange in the ’50s and ’60s. They were known as the Metabolists, or what the authors call “the first non-Western avant-garde movement in architecture.” Essentially, the group penned a manifesto for what postwar Japan should look like, and promptly carried it forth; the pinnacle arrived with Tange’s master plan for Expo ’70 in Osaka. At 720 pages, this is not a light read, but rather a rich archive of a time when architecture was a powerful tool for heightening national identity – something the authors believe no longer holds true. Irma Boom’s magnificent graphic design and typographic mastery turns this book from Taschen into a virtual fetish object.  You may also like: New Japan Architecture, published by Tuttle, which looks at over 40 contemporary Japanese firms, many of whom share aesthetics established by the Metabolists.  By Catherine Osborne

Taschen   ISBN 9783836525084

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