A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

Made avail­able by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da (NFB), A is for Archi­tec­ture “offers a thor­ough, colour­ful, and charm­ing tour through the grandeur of ancient Greece, the Byzan­tine tra­di­tion through­out Chris­t­ian Europe and Mus­lim Asia, the mid­dle ages with their walled up cas­tles and locked-down cities, the lux­u­ry of Louis XIV’s France, the awe-inspir­ing atmos­phere of goth­ic church­es, the hope, progress, and speed of the ear­ly indus­tri­al mod­ern era, and final­ly the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the urban sky­scrap­ers of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry.” “What do we build?” asks the film. And “how will the sto­ry read when our time has passed?” Direct­ed by Ger­ald Bud­ner and Robert Ver­rall in 1960, the short doc­u­men­tary runs just shy of 30 min­utes.

A is for Archi­tec­ture will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries Online, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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