Architectures, Volume 4 (DVD)

"The Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans": At the end of the 18th century in Franche Comt, Claude Nicolas Ledoux built a monumental factory for the king of France. It was at once an aesthetic revolution, a groundbreaking industrial site and the nucleus of an ideal city which was never to see the light of day. "La Maison de Verre": Between 1928 and 1932, in Paris, the decorator Pierre Chareau, constructed an avant-garde house made of steel and glass. It's a habitable machine - playful and poetic, full of surprises and find; a work that's as rhythmic as it is unclassifiable. "The Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao": In 1997, the Guggenheim Foundation inaugurated a new museum built by Frank O. Gehry. Already known for his strange, deconstructed shapes, in Billbao, he conceived a building to the scale of his ambitions: a monumental sculpture that incorporates chaotic and abstract elements. "Jean Prouvr's House": Jean Prouvr dreamed of creating houses as beautiful and rational as airplanes. In 1953, while undergoing the worst crisis of his life, he built his own house. Created in a rush, it nonetheless incarnates his most groundbreaking ideas. "The Multimedia Library of Senda": A glass cube built in Japan in 2001 by Toyo Ito. The transparent scaffolding, the absence of walls, the flexibility of spaces - the sum of these is the mediatheque, a building borne of architecture that is immaterial and evanescent. "The Abbey Church of Sainte Foy at Conques": In 1050, in Conque, in the middle of the savage Aveyron landscape, one of the Occident's first great churches of so-called "pilgrimage roads" was built. It is an incontestable masterpiece of Roman art - rational, audacious and luminous