With the firm Front, in which he is a Partner, Marc Simmons has collaborated on projects with OMA, Asymptote Architecture, ARO, Beyer Blinder Belle, Gehry Partners, Herzog & De Meuron, Kengo Kuma, KPF, Mack Scogin Merril Elam Architects, Renzo Piano, Sejima + Nishizawa Associates, Steven Holl Architects, Toshiko Mori, and many other architects. His lecture will explore themes in his recent work, including the speculative and experimental potential of the facade specialist. — youtube.com

Two top entries have been announced in the 2011 edition of the annual short film competition hosted by SMIBE, The Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment. Under the theme "Building Revolution," the contest had invited moving image stories that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing. — bustler.net

Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island explores the work of the region’s best postwar architects and designers, including Albert Frey, Wallace Harrison, Herbert Beckhard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Horace Gifford, Edward Durrell Stone, Marcel Breuer, Andrew Geller, Philip Johnson, Charles Gwathmey, Barbara and Julian Neski, and others. The film features interviews with architects and historians, as well as friends, families and clients of these influential designers. — vimeo.com

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

A video in three parts presenting three speculative design proposals, each probing a pathological aspect of the built environment. — johnszot.com

Hard proof that we are living in the future: To promote the recent New York City marathon, Asics hooked up a 60-foot video wall in Manhattan's Columbus Circle subway station, inviting commuters to race against life-sized footage of Olympic marathon runner Ryan Hall. Hall zips by at his average pace while you see if you can match it. — core77.com

Piranha was commissioned by Silverstein Properties to create a short film depicting the completion of The New World Trade Center site. Piranha wrote, produced, art directed, filmed, and finished all vfx for this inspiring piece marking the 10th year anniversary of 9/11. — Vimeo

What we are finding is that what we want is access to things...Our cities I would put to you are stockpiles of surplus capacities...What we probably will find is that turning these products into services that we have access to when we want them is a far smarter way to go. In fact even space itself is turning into a service. — TED

A short back story. Towards the end of the school year, Julien De Smedt came to UIC to lecture. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview him for a forthcoming Fresh Meat article. Through the conversation, talk of short films came up. This led on to another conversation and then to something else (i don't remember all the details I'll have to review the recording). Long story short, I was asked to come to Copenhagen to work on a small Project for JDS. — University of Illinois Chicago (Matthew)

The lecture provides an overview of OMA’s recent thinking and will cover three interrelated topics: the growth of Preservation, and its blind spots; architecture and democracy; and the ongoing development of the office itself. — OMA's vimeo