Paula Scher: Graphic Design • 2017 • episode "S1E6" • Abstract: The Art of Design

45:54

Piers and Caroline travel to Norway to see a charming family cottage, a summer house built around a rock, a daring concrete home and a rugged retreat.

S2E7 • The World's Most Extraordinary Homes • 2019 • Design

49:43

Monet, Cezanne, Degas and Renoir are some of the world's most popular artists. Their works, and that of their contemporaries, fetch tens of millions of dollars around the globe. Who were they and how exactly did they paint? To help answer these questions, this film focuses on the man credited with inventing impressionism as we know it - 19th-century Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel. It was his brave decision to back these radical artists and then, on the verge of bankruptcy, to exhibit them in New York in 1886 that created impressionism as we know it. Thanks to his sales to enlightened wealthy Americans that subsequently filled US galleries with impressionist masterworks, Durand-Ruel kept impressionism alive at a time when it faced complete failure. This film tells his remarkable story, along with that of the impressionists themselves.

S1E2 • Great Art • 2018 • Design

5:49

For two millennia, great artists set the standard for beauty. Now those standards are gone. Modern Art is a competition between the ugly and the twisted; the most shocking wins. What happened?

Design

46:36

In Switzerland, Piers and Caroline tour a modern chalet, a concrete retreat, an S-shaped home and a house built for it's owner's classic cars

S2E3 • The World's Most Extraordinary Homes • 2018 • Design

58:55

We each spend three years of our lives on the toilet, but how happy are we talking about this essential part of our lives? This film challenges that mindset by uncovering its role in our culture and exploring the social history of the toilet in Britain and abroad - as well as exploring many of our cultural toilet taboos. Starting in Merida, Spain with some of the the earliest surviving Roman toilets, we journey around the world - from the UK to China, Japan and Bangladesh - visiting toilets, ranging from the historically significant to the beautiful, from the functional and sometimes not-so-functional to the downright bizarre. Leading the journey is Everyman figure, Welsh poet and presenter Ifor ap Glyn, who has a passionate interest in the toilet, its history and how it has evolved over the centuries, right up to the development of the current design. Finally, there's a glimpse of the future and a possible solution to the global sanitation issues we now face.

2012 • Design

45:23

Can we design our way out of an ecological crisis? At the MIT Media Lab, Professor Neri Oxman cultivates new materials that emulate nature.

S2E2 • Abstract: The Art of Design • 2019 • Design