Designing With Nature: Arts & Crafts Architecture in Northern California

Jan 1, 2009

1h 26m

★ 0.0

Overview

Designing with Nature provides a vivid account of a pivotal chapter in the architectural history of Northern California. Set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the documentary examines the work of several major architects who were influenced by Arts and Crafts ideals, as well as by the reformist ethos of the Progressive Era. These designers sought to create an architecture suited to the landscape, climate, and emerging culture of the region. Rejecting Victorian excess and the artificial separation of art and craft, they strove to create an organic architecture based on unified design and harmony with nature.

Genres

Documentary

Production Companies

Paul Bockhorst Productions

Designing With Nature: Arts & Crafts Architecture in Northern California Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Narrator

Richard Doyle

Commentary

Robert Judson Clark

Commentary

Richard Longstreth

Commentary

Kenneth Cardwell

Commentary

Richard Guy Wilson

Commentary

Leslie Freudenheim

Commentary

Susan Cerny

Commentary

James Lawrence

Commentary

John Gaul

Commentary

Carol Ann Rogers

Commentary

Polly Moore

Commentary

Marilyn Thomas

"I especially hope to inspire young women, because I often feel like so much emphasis is put on how beautiful you are, and how thin you are, and not a lot of emphasis is put on what you can do and how smart you are. I'd like to change the emphasis of what's important when looking at a woman." Filmed in San Francisco in 2000, Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) discusses the female figures she incorporated into many of her paintings and graffiti tags. Loosely based on women she discovered while listening to folk records, watching buck dance videos, or reading about the history of swimming, Kilgallen painted her heroines to inspire others and to change how society looks at women. Three of Kilgallen's heroines—Matokie Slaughter, Algia Mae Hinton, and Fanny Durack—are shown and heard through archival recordings. Kilgallen is shown tagging train cars with her husband, artist Barry McGee, in a Bay Area rail yard and painting in her studio at UC Berkeley (source: Art21).

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