construction

Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

A 39-minute BBC documentary, built from earlier British Transport Films footage, on how the London Underground's Victoria Line was dug in the 1960s.

A short vintage film clip of Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on using computers to spark children's imagination and learning.

The first episode of Stewart Brand's 1997 BBC series based on his book How Buildings Learn, covering how buildings change after they are built. Brand presents and the series has music by Brian Eno.

Kirsten Dirksen tours new Earthships, homes built from tires, bottles and cans that generate their own energy, collect water and grow food. The video covers the newer, cheaper Encounter model and its passive systems.

A short film following Moroccan artisans from Fez as they build a traditional 15th-century-style Moroccan court inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows zellij tilework and other traditional techniques.

Kirsten Dirksen profiles Steve Rees, who buried two shipping containers to build an earth-cooled, off-grid 640 sq ft home in Northern California for about $30,000, solar included.

Fred Dibnah, the English steeplejack, shows how ladders are fixed up the outside of a tall brick mill chimney. The footage was filmed in the mid-1990s and is part one of two.

Kirsten Dirksen tours the underground ferro-cement dome home of Paula and Bill Lishman, the family behind the geese-led flight story. The skylit earth-sheltered house stays warm below the frost line.

An SBS Dateline short documentary on Danish forest kindergartens, where children play freely outdoors, climb trees and use knives with little adult intervention.

A 1969 BBC Tomorrow's World segment about Nellie, a school computer used by pupils at Forest Grammar School to solve equations and play music. Students learn programming and maintenance, and act out binary arithmetic.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

A long documentary-style video arguing that slavery in the US effectively continued through convict leasing and the prison system until around 1942. It covers the constitutional carveout and the history of neoslavery.

Brian Springer's documentary Spin, built entirely from unauthorized satellite feeds of politicians and newscasters before they went on air during the 1992 US presidential election. It exposes the behind-the-scenes construction of media reality.

The US Chemical Safety Board's updated animation of the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion, which killed 15 workers. It was released ahead of a process safety training application.

A 41-minute factory tour showing how the BMW i3 electric car is built from start to finish, in the style of a Megafactories documentary. It shows a highly automated production line with carbon-fiber body construction and robots doing most of the work.