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• I.M. Pei - First Person Singular/The Museum on the Mountain
• Peter Rosen (1997)
• Editorial Reviews - Product Description by Amazon.com
  Featuring two full-length documentaries, this special edition DVD grants the viewer unfettered access into the mind and artistic philosophy of one of the greatest living legends in architecture: I.M. Pei. Pei's childhood, education, and experiences reveal a life dedicated to the mystery and poetry of structural geometry in First Person Singular, while The Museum on the Mountain tells the intriguing story of the conception, design, and building of Japan's majestic Miho Museum in the mountains near Kyoto. The disc also features a project archive with detailed photos, drawings, and descriptions of twenty I.M. Pei structures.
  
  

• My Architect: A Son's Journey
• Nathaniel Kahn (2003)
• Editorial Reviews by Amazon.com
  One nonfiction film that truly creates a narrative journey, My Architect is filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn's engrossing search for his father. Louis Kahn, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, died in 1974 and left behind a highly compartmentalized life, including two children born out of wedlock to two mistresses. Nathaniel interviews the members of this somewhat puzzled family, but his deepest experiences are visits to the buildings that his father made (such as the grand Salk Institute in La Jolla, California), culminating in an emotional trip to Bangladesh. Here, Louis Kahn designed a massive government complex, a soaring achievement (and fascinating paradox--a Muslim capital designed by a Jewish man). This film asks: where does an artist truly live? In his life, or in the work he leaves behind? Nathaniel Kahn takes an amazingly even-tempered approach to this, given his personal stake in the story, and the result is a uniquely stirring movie. --Robert Horton
  

• Philip Johnson: Diary of An Eccentric Architect
• Barbara Wolf (1996)
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• Sir John Soane: An English Architect, An American Legacy
• Murray Grigor (2005)
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• Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack
• Sydney Pollack (2005)
• Editorial Reviews by Amazon.com
  Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollock chronicles the friendship between director Sydney Pollock and the famed architect every bit as much as it does Gehry and his work, and it makes for a delightful window into the world of creativity and genius. Gehry has made a big imprint (which critics might liken to Bigfoot's) on architecture at the turn of the 21st century; his molten-looking visions have graced buildings small (actor Dennis Hopper's industrial-looking home in Venice, Calif.) to enormous (the sprawling Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain). He's the genius behind Los Angeles's sweeping Walt Disney Concert Hall--which, though formidable in shape and size, manages to nod gracefully to its adjoining, beloved predecessor, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (He also created the controversial Experience Music Project museum in Seattle, which residents have likened to a giant psychedelic beetle crouched at the foot of the Space Needle.)
  
  For creating such mega-structures, Gehry is remarkably self-effacing; as he and an associate fiddle with a model with bent rooflines and walls, Gehry chuckles, "That is so stupid-looking, it's great!" Yet make no mistake, he possesses a singular vision and strong ego, which we view not only through the wide variety of his works, but also from interviews with friends, architecture critics, and clients, including artist Ed Ruscha, Hopper, L.A. talent manager Mike Ovitz, architect Philip Johnson, and others. Pollock's intimate conversational film allows us to feel as though we're sitting right there on the couch with them, or in Gehry's "factory" of associates and assistants; in its backstage look at the process of creativity, the film feels a little like TV's Project Runway, in the very best sense. As the viewer gets to know Gehry, one finds oneself wishing for more biographical details to be fleshed out--what was Gehry's childhood really like, for instance, and how does he feel about having changed his birth name, Goldberg, at the request of his first wife? Still, for a peek into the world of one of America's most prolific artists, the film is a rare opportunity to get up close and personal. Extras include more conversations between Pollock and Gehry and further examinations of his creations. --A.T. Hurley
  
  

• The Architect
• Matt Tauber (2006)
• Editorial Reviews by Amazon.com
  Anthony LaPaglia, an expert at playing the conflicted Everyman, notches another such character in The Architect, a low-budget adaptation of a play by David Greig. LaPaglia plays a Chicago architect, complacent in his teaching theories and obsessed with his scale models, who doesn't comprehend the effect of his designs on the people who actually live in his buildings. Case in point: an eighties-era housing project, now overrun by gangs, drugs, and despair. It's gotten so bad that resident Viola Davis (World Trade Center) is petitioning the city to tear the place down, and she's approached the architect about signing. Meanwhile, the movie ranges across the families of both characters, including LaPaglia's massively confused teenaged kids (Hayden Panettiere, Sebastian Stan), both of whom are trying on unfamiliar sexual roles. Isabella Rossellini plays LaPaglia's dazed wife, who straightens up the house in order to stave off the unhappiness of her marriage. In short, there's a lot going on here, too much for the brief running time of the movie; these people tend to have emblematic traits and not much else. Enlivened by actors, that kind of thing can work better on stage than in film, where the material feels skeletal. LaPaglia and Davis are in excellent form, however, and earn some of the power of the final moments. --Robert Horton