Not Built in a Day

Of the three Gary Hustwit documentaries I've seen, this being the third and last, I thought Urbanized was the best by far.  It's like a primer on the most-discussed issues of urbanism today.  So while I can't say I learned much from the movie, Urbanized is a great introduction to this range of topics, and I'm supposed to know this stuff anyway as part of my profession.  The visuals are also great: if you're an urbanism buff, you'll enjoy trying to figure out which city is being shown before the titles are given; the aerial views comparing cities are pretty spectacular; and there are some fun interviews with people around the world, including government officials in Santiago, Chile; Bogota, Colombia; and in New York City.  I should warn the urbanism buffs, though, that you may get impatient sometimes with the pacing, since so much will already be familiar.  But it's still worth a viewing.  For everyone else, you will probably learn a lot, including some thi...

I can't pretend to be exceptionally knowledgeable about product design, but as an almost-architect, I like to think I know a decent amount.  So I've considered it my duty to watch Gary Hustwit's trilogy on design, Helvetica (on typefaces), Objectified (on product/industrial design), and Urbanized (on urban design).  I haven't gotten to the third one yet, but I wanted to go ahead and discuss the first two before I forget. Like Helvetica , I thought Objectified was a nice, shiny tribute to the design world, providing a narrow range of viewpoints on design ("does design matter more than everything else, or just more than most things?") without really convincing the viewer that design matters at all.  The sequences showing items in production were cool, but none of the talking heads and silent panning shots did much to persuade me of anything.  I wish the director had done more editorializing.  The most engaging person he interviewed explained how Apple lapt...