Now Mr. Ai is answering the guards’ request in a different key. He is presenting them, and the world, with his first heavy-metal music video, one with detailed re-creations of scenes from his 81 days of detention. He also portrays fantasies he imagines flitting through the guards’ minds. Mr. Ai posted the video on a Web site, aiweiwei.com, on Wednesday morning, Beijing time. — nytimes.com

Earlier this year in February, we reported that the architectual team Henning Larsen Architects + COBE + SLA had won the design competition for the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden—soon to become the world’s largest and most advanced facility for neutron-based research. The architects have now released a video which provides insight on the ESS project, building, and surroundings. — bustler.net

I went travelling through Japan, China, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia with my girlfriend. Since getting back to the UK I've condensed some of the video footage from that time into a 5 and a half minute video. — archinect.com

This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building.
A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have differents nationalities. — vimeo.com

The Residencia is a hotel for staff and guests at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. Located in an extremely remote and desolate section of the Atacama desert, the Residencia was designed by the German architecture firm Auer + Weber as a sanctuary in an environment that has never supported life. The L-shaped building was dug into the ground as if to conceal its presence, presenting profoundly different faces depending on the approach. — vimeo.com

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