The short form of the music video, although mostly a bubble gum affair, can sometimes be a successful bite-size spatial experiment. This feature looks at some of those that overlap the music video format with architecture, landscape, and/or urbanism. We haven't got all of them here, but maybe a few that you might have missed and more than a few that would stand in well as design proposals.

Call in the army corps of architects
To flatten the skyline and begin again
- Army Corps of Architects , Death Cab for Cutie

Spiral city architect
I build, you pay
- Spiral Architect , Black Sabbath

If there's been a way to build it
There'll be a way to destroy it
Things are not all that out of control.
- Crest , Stereolab

And I am nothing of a builder
But here I dreamt I was an architect
And I built this balustrade
To keep you home, to keep you safe
From the outside world
But the angles and the corners
Even though my work is unparalleled
They never seemed to meet
- Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect , The Decemberists

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Thanks to my co-pilots, Alex (AW), Heather (HR), and Orhan (OA).
- Mason White


ARCHITECTURE


Battles, Atlas (2007, by Timothy Saccenti)
Admittedly a personal favorite, the Atlas video portrays a mathematically inclined troupe stomping and jumping in a mirrored room. The transparent room spins through space reflecting its inside to itself in a Dan Graham-like ricochet. If only Johnson's glasshouse could rock this hard. - MW


Ezekiel Honig, Concrete & Plastic (2006, by Joshue Ott / superdraw)
The is really just one big drawing using Processing, but it is remarkable to follow its evolution. Ott uses semi-generative design and has paralleled Honig's expanding aural growth with rotating line nests. The sequence achieves considerable depth within the single line limitations of Ott's own superdraw program. (more ) - MW


Liricas Analas, Siemis (2006, by Patrick Julier)
Bonus points to Liricas Analas (ass rhymes!) for rapping in Rumantsch , but the real star here is Peter Zumthor's Thermal Baths in Vals. Entirely shot on the interior and with low lighting, the baths seems to double as a monastic retreat. The video employs frequent symmetries and many odd medieval references. - MW


Isan, Gunnera (2005, by Mark Allon)
Who would have thought that escalators could be so beautiful? Gunnera opens with the hypnotic tracking of escalator treads within a transit building. A translucent glazed facade fades in and out of brightness occasionally marked with a red beam and silhouettes. - MW


Feist, My Moon My Man (2007, by Patrick Daughters)
Now here's a good, old-fashioned song-and-dance video. I mean, how much better would layovers and delays be if we all got down with the airport-architecture? Don't stop with the moving-walkways, though ... run up the runway, slide down the security-check, twirl on the baggage-turnstile. - HR


Radiohead, Go To Sleep (2003, by Alexander Rutterford).
Rutterford employs 3d animation with intentional roughness, this time with more recognizable objects and figures. Thom Yorke is digitally rendered up close in all his triangulated glory. Meanwhile a crowd of workers swarm about this fictional (English) town. Crowds march unhesitatingly through the streets as Yorke's howls bring down the digital city. Postmodern facades crumble to the pavement and are then reassembled just in time. (more ) - MW


Autechre, Gantz Graf (2002, by Alexander Rutterford).
A floating cog-like ring jitters with each frantic click and pulse of Gantz Graf. Rutterford constructed this choreographed machinery by assigning numerical values to Autechre's arrhythmic structure. The syncopated digital belches of noise ripples across the metallic surface of the cog. Dont miss the final 30 seconds. (more ) - MW


Royksopp, Remind Me (2002, by H5).
Information culture is in the limelight here, as each act triggers a sequence exposing the system behind it. From transit systems to computing to food ingestion to stock markets, its all there in labelled dynamic glory. (see pruned for a more complete homage.) - MW


Brian Eno & David Byrne, Mea Culpe (1981, by Brian Eno?)
Architecture via bio-chemical psychological diagrams and models. Somewhere between diagram fields and oscillating geometries resides something architectural. - MW


LANDSCAPE


Mum, Green Grass Of Tunnel (2002, by semi conductor)
Caught somewhere between digital and analog, Semi Conductor have modeled the very lighthouse where Mum recorded the track. Following a flock of starlings(?) across the vast sea and over giant icebergs, the Icelandic landscape is revealed. - MW


Fiery Furnaces, Tropical Ice-Land (2003, by ?)
A childhood pop-up book merges the Arctic's melting icecaps with Dubai's theme-park aspirations to bring us the Tropi-coolest Iceland ever. If only we built our cities the way Fiery Furnaces told their stories! - HR


Mogwai, Travel Is Dangerous (2005, by Monkmus)
A strange breed of alien insects bypasses the city heading straight for portals embedded in the landscape that then become, of course, escape pods! - MW


Animal Collective, Leaf House (2005, by a fan)
Animal Collectives' Leaf House is really a political tract on gentrification. The new homeowners are putting the squatters into a feverish little frenzy ... and I think the dog might be gentrifiling that doll. - HR


Colleen, The Happy Sea (2006, by Carolina Melis)
Melis' fractal-like patterns converge and disperse in this white sea. - MW


Stars of the Lid, Apreludes (in C Sharp Major) (2007, by Luke Savisky)
A duotone land-scan in the vein of Stalker . - MW


Loscil, Motoc (2006, by ?)
Pans of normative landscapes (and skyscapes) with scratchy interruptions. - MW


URBANISM


Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, The Message (1982, by Sylvia Robinson)
The perception and depiction of architecture in hip hop videos has always played an extremely important role since it started to exist as an independent art form twenty five years ago. This clip, shot in the South Bronx and New York City, set standards in the way architecture was to be portrayed for more than a decade: rundown houses, low-income housing, urban landmarks, and architectural 'non-spaces' which carried an extreme personal association with a city/hood/street/place that shapes a definition of 'home'. - AW


N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton (1989, by Rupert Wainwright)
The morbid depiction of neighborhoods and the violent love-hate relation of its residents with it were soon adopted and applied to early West Coast Hip Hop. City, neighborhood, and street become the pivot point of numerous microcosms, in this clip, Compton, South Central Los Angeles. - AW


Massive Attack, Unfinished Sympathy (1991, by Baillie Walsh)
The morbid grunge style soon influenced videos of soul and trip hop music to emphasize and denounce social injustice of urban neighborhoods. This clip, shot in January 1991 on West Pico Boulevard between S. New Hampshire Avenue and Dewey Avenue in Los Angeles, CA, was one of the earliest music videos to use a continuous shot. - AW


Ma$e, Feel So Good (1997, by Hype Williams).
In the mid-1990s, the style of depicted buildings slowly shifted from grunge towards flamboyant and exuberant architecture as a symbol of luxury, wealth, and power. This clip is set in Las Vegas and blows the perfectly distilled Vegas moments up to a sheer intoxicating scenery. - AW


50 Cent, P.I.M.P. (2003, by Chris Robinson)
Contemporary mainstream hip hop videos have almost completely perverted architecture to a ridiculous farce where shiny white villas, neo-baroque staircases, and humongous pool areas are complimentary served with bling, cars, girls, and Cristal. This clip is one of the most popular examples of pimp gangsta hip hop videos. - AW


Beastie Boys, Open Letter to NYC (2004, by ?)
The Beastie Boys' music video oeuvre includes various direct references and homages to specific cities. An Open Letter To NYC portrays the 5 boroughs in fast, DIY-look pictures that are rushing by with the speed of NYC itself. In the critically acclaimed video for Sabotage (1994), director Spike Jonze chose a 1970s retro-look Los Angeles as vibrant setting for a fictional police television show. The awarded clip for Intergalactic (1998) mixes location shots of the band at Tokyo's Shibuya and Shinjuku train stations with a Godzilla parody between high-rises of a fictional Japanese city...which will be laid in ashes... - AW


Roni Size, Brown Paper Bag (1998, by Nick Gordon)
Drum'n Bass music has always been closely associated with urban city life. The clip, shot in a dense downtown setting in Liberty Village Toronto, Canada, broaches the issue of space/time manipulation and is held in a very clean 1950s Egon Eiermann aesthetics. - AW


Jan Jelinek, Modell Stadt Berlin (by Visiomat inc.)
From small to large, from abstract to model city, until Jelinek's beat adds a third dimension, a trembling blur to the prefab estate. Cuts, stripes and fields for a true memory effect. Visomat prefer to work with space itself and, with gentle implacability, pay homage to a city destined to return to its banal, abstract void. - AW


Thom Yorke, The Eraser (2006, by Robjn)
Using B-Filter cameras and painting with light, Robjn created the clip as a long beautiful pan shot in an empty parking structure that gives enough room for the song's complex rhythm structure and does not distract from Yorke's sui generis voice. - AW


John Cooper Clarke, Chickentown 2 (1981, by ?)
Another city in England. dissipating in industrial aftermath. A panorama as familiar as universal smoke stacks... - OA


Kurban, Yine (2006, by ?)
Here is a Turkish band with 'shipping containers.' Kurban is the band, a heavy metal band that sounds all too familiar with a nice Turkish melody mixed in. - OA


Los Campesinos, You! Me! Dancing! (2007, by ?)
A cautionary tale about the perils of evolving your world without alien-proofing your architecture. - HR


BONUS


Windows Architects, You Need A Plan
Must show to clients... - MW



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