Junko Fukutake Terrace

The terrace is located at Okayama University's Tsushima campus in Japan. This was the third of three projects that SANAA did for the university. The building has a winding roof made from paper-thin (12 mm) steel, supported by slender steel columns. I love how the building feels as though it's barely hovering above the ground. It’s paper-thin, yet it blends beautifully with the nature surrounding it, and allows light to filter through without having an obstructed view from any area in the space. One of my other favorite projects of theirs that uses a similar structure of light steel in a curving path and thin columns is the River Building, which was completed for Grace Farms located in Connecticut.

The reason that SANAA’s buildings feel so relaxing is because humans are wired to feel safe when we can see out but still feel sheltered.1 Sharp angles put your brain on alert; curved ones don’t. As for the lighting, SANAA relies heavily on the daytime sun. There is no harsh glare or dark shadows. All of these things create “reduction of effort and threat.” All of the elements that make up SANAA's buildings remove stress because there aren't any surroundings the brain would have to brace against.

Louvre-Lens Museum

The Louvre-Lens Museum is built with glass and polished, anodized aluminum facades (aluminum that shines like mirrors). The polished, anodized aluminum facade is one of SANAA’s favorite materials. They love to make their buildings blend into the surrounding space by using reflective materials.

There are three Louvre museums: the Musée du Louvre in Paris (with its iconic glass pyramid), the Louvre-Lens (in Lens, France), and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

In their floor plans SANAA never creates a forced path or a center of any building; the point of this is so that you drift rather than being directed. This creates what environmental psychologist Stephen Kaplan called “soft fascination”2 which is effortless attention that lets the mind’s directed-attention muscles rest and recover.

Selected References:

Design Boom, Junko Fukutake Terrace, SANAA

Architectural Digest, Grace Farms, SANAA

Dezeen, Louvre-Lens Museum, SANAA

Moriyama House

The Moriyama House was commissioned by Yasuo Moriyama (I highly recommend watching the film Moriyama-San, which shows his life as he lives in this space). The house is made up of ten white-painted steel blocks, with each block serving a specific function: for example, one block could be a bedroom, the next a kitchen, and the next a bathroom, and the list goes on. There are no gates around the plot of land each block is on, so anyone could move freely between them.

The house was designed to feel like one is moving through their own miniature village. It was built in 2005, and is made out of white-painted thin steel and glass panels. This design was seen as radical because it blurred the line between private home and public city. Since the functions of a normal house are split across separate blocks, moving between blocks means stepping outside, into space that feels open to the city rather than sealed within a house. One of my favorite features of this design is that as an individual walks from one block to the next, they are constantly surrounded by small gardens and courtyards, which I thought was a lovely way to make a city feel like your own piece of nature. Because the second you leave the plot of land, you're back in a city, but you can return to your own garden escape within moments.

Teshima Art Museum

The museum was designed by Nishizawa and holds the installation piece named Matrix, by Japanese artist Rei Naito. Nishizawa was inspired by the way a water droplet looks the second it lands. Because of the terrain of the area, he wanted the building to feel organic and blend into the surrounding nature. The building is able to blend in through its low, shell-like shape, with openings that allow rain, sunlight, and views of the nearby forest in. The museum was completed in 2010.

Above is the artwork Matrix (the curved white string attached to Nishizawa's building).

House A

House A is a private family home that Nishizawa designed in 2004. The building was completed in 2007. The house shares a feature with the Moriyama House in that it is made of offset cubes, but here they are clustered closer together rather than fully detached. This lets light come in from multiple directions, and lets the perimeter of the house be immersed in greenery.

The house is made primarily of glass in steel frames for the exterior, while the interior uses wood and smooth concrete with white-painted walls.

The throughline between all of these works is Nishizawa's love for things that appear organic. He manages to make even the most heavy materials, such as the reinforced concrete of the Teshima Art Museum, feel as though it's the most lightweight and organic object that could have existed in that area. Nishizawa constantly prioritizes building things that blend into their surroundings: whether that's blocks of houses made of white-painted steel and glass with small gardens between them, a paper-thin steel-and-glass house where greenery surrounds the perimeter and light comes in from nearly every direction, or a thin concrete shell in the shape of a just-fallen raindrop. He finds a way to make the most abstract ideas seem like the most pure thing to do, because of how natural they feel.

Selected References:

This Is Paper, Moriyama House, Ryue Nishizawa

Dezeen, Moriyama House, Ryue Nishizawa

Archigardener, Teshima Art Museum, Ryue Nishizawa

Arcr.ru, Teshima Art Museum, Ryue Nishizawa

Arquitectura Viva, House A, Ryue Nishizawa

House in a Plum Grove

The House in a Plum Grove is located in Setagaya, Tokyo, and was commissioned by a client who wanted to preserve the plum trees around the plot of the land, so they asked Sejima to fit a compact, three-story house without removing a single plum tree. The clients wanted a one-room lifestyle, which Sejima interpreted as an accumulation of rooms linked together, which is why the only door in the house is the front door. The outside of the paper-thin steel is coated with reflective paint, which bounces the sun's heat off the walls. To minimize the radiation from the sun, they added 30mm of insulation, as opposed to the standard (exterior wall) 100mm. The reason they were able to add less is because the thin steel plates cool very fast.

I also included the scale model of the House in a Plum Grove (the model was also designed by Sejima). It was built with aluminum, wood, paper and polystyrene rather than the white reflective-painted steel of the actual house. This model does not have the flat roof the real house does, so viewers can look down through each layer of the house. The model is quite large, measuring about 56 × 53.5 × 51 inches.

Suimei Water Pavilion

Kazuyo Sejima designed the Suimei Pavilion for Pavilion Tokyo 2021, a project that connected Tokyo’s historical past with its present during the Tokyo Olympics. Sejima chose to place it in the Hama-rikyu Gardens which is a preserved historic garden built by feudal lords in 1654. When she was designing the pavilion, she was inspired by kyokusui, an ancient Japanese landscaping style. The streams themselves are made from polished stainless steel, so the shallow water glitters as it moves through them. The name Suimei itself translates to clear water shining under the light of the sun and moon. The slow-flowing water was designed to reflect the sky, surrounding trees, and nearby modern skyscrapers, symbolizing the connection between Tokyo's past, present, and future.

Sumida Hokusai Museum

Sejima was commissioned by the Sumida Ward government (Sumida is one of the 23 wards / districts in Tokyo). The museum was created in dedication to woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai. Sejima designed slits in the building (seen above) so people can easily walk through and around the structure from all directions. For the exterior, she chose mirrored aluminum panels that reflect the sky and streets, so the building almost blends into the neighborhood. The building was completed in 2016. For reference, I selected two Hokusai works:

The through line between all of these works is that they use very thin steel or aluminum. Sejima loves these light, minimal materials for the way their reflectivity and lightweight appearance allow the buildings to blend into their space: a cube-like house threaded around plum trees, a water pavilion reflecting the Tokyo sun to represent past and present, and a museum honoring the iconic woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Selected References:

MoMA, Kazuyo Sejima House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo, Japan

Design Boom, Kazuyo Sejima, Suimei Water Pavillion

Design Boom, Kazuyo Sejima, Sumida Hokusai Museum

Optima, Women in Architecture: Kazuyo Sejima

As seen in the image above, the large hydraulic piston carries his desk and workspace up and down the center of the house. Instead of going to a fixed office room, the office itself moves and delivers him to whichever floor he wants, with his bedroom on the top (third) floor. As the platform stops at each level it merges with that floor, letting him move freely through the space before returning to the platform when he needs to travel to another level.

The floor plan is what I find astounding. The building defies the structural grid, the pattern of columns and supports that most buildings line up the same way on every floor so the weight passes straight down to the ground. Instead, Koolhaas stacked three very different floor plans on top of each other, which usually wouldn’t be structurally possible without columns marching straight down through everything.

The bottom level is carved into the hill and enclosed. The middle level is surrounded by glass and open to the landscape. The top level sits over the glazed middle so it looks as if it’s floating. This top floor is made of dark-colored reinforced concrete punctured with portholes (as seen in the image to the in the middle above), and it holds the children’s and parents’ bedrooms.

The third floor’s floating illusion comes from three separate supports working together, each kept away from the edges of the house. Nothing runs down the building’s outer edges, so there is no visible structure holding the box up. Instead, there is a steel support hidden in the bookshelf wall (the bookshelf wall can be seen in the image to the left). The second support that allows the third floor to have a floating illusion is the external post and cable (seen in the image in the middle). The cable pulls down toward the ground in order to counterbalance. The third support is the steel tube on one side of the house, which contains a spiral staircase (seen in the image to the right). The steel tube works as a compression support: the heavy concrete box presses down on it, and the tube carries that weight down through every level to the ground.

Koolhaas worked on Maison à Bordeaux with Sri Lankan engineer Cecil Balmond, who worked for London engineering firm Arup at the time. The two collaborated on some of OMA's (Koolhaas' firm's) most innovative projects (Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Casa da Música...the list goes on).

Selected References:

E-Architect, Maison à Bordeaux

OMA, Maison à Bordeaux

Carnegie Museum of Art, Cecil Balmond

Donald Judd served in the U.S. Army as an engineer in Korea from June 1946 to November 1947 (from age 18 to 19). After returning to the US, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1948 but transferred after a few months to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he spent two semesters from 1948 to 1949, before he decided to move back to New York. Judd earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University in New York City in 1953. While he was earning his degree at Columbia, he was taking classes at the Art Students League. Judd later returned to Columbia for graduate study in art history in the late 1950s, working toward a master's under art historians Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Schapiro while continuing to take classes at the Art Students League.

Selected Passages: Judd’s 1965 Essay “Specific Objects”

“The composition must react to the edges and the rectangle must be unified, but the shape of the rectangle is not stressed; the parts are more important, and the relationships of color and form occur among them. In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still, and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple and correspond closely to the rectangle. The shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane. The parts are few and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordinary sense. A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite form; it is no longer a fairly neutral limit. A form can be used only in so many ways.”

“Almost all paintings are spatial in one way or another. Yves Klein’s blue paintings are the only ones that are unspatial, and there is little that is nearly unspatial, mainly Stella’s work. It’s possible that not much can be done with both an upright rectangular plane and an absence of space. Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors on the same surface almost always lie on different depths. An even color, especially in oil paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always both flat and infinitely spatial. The space is shallow in all of the work in which the rectangular plane is stressed. Rothko’s space is shallow and the soft rectangles are parallel to the plane, but the space is almost traditionally illusionistic. In Reinhardt’s paintings, just back from the plane of the canvas, there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely deep.”

“There are precedents for some of the characteristics of the new work: the parts are usually subordinate and not separate in Arp’s sculpture and often in Brancusi’s. Duchamp’s readymades and other Dada objects are also seen at once and not part by part. Cornell’s boxes have too many parts to seem at first to be structured. Part-by-part structure can’t be too simple or too complicated. It has to seem orderly."

As a reference point for his remarks about the confines of painting, I’ve included one of Judd’s paintings above (from 1958), and in 1962 he switched to three-dimensional work.

Donald Judd Career Timeline

• In 1968, Judd purchased his studio space in SoHo (Judd owned all five floors)

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• In 1969, Judd was creating his Untitled pieces, which relied on industrial materials such as galvanized iron, aluminum, stainless steel, and colored plexiglass (which is what the image to the right is made of).

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• In 1970, Donald Judd had openings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and at Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands.

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• In 1971, Judd left New York for Marfa, Texas, in order to escape the New York art world and find space for large-scale installations, where he could combine his love of nature, art, and architecture. He wanted to control the permanent display of his work without the constraints of a museum

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References:

Judd Foundation

Judd Foundation Library

Dia Art, Donald Judd

Dictionary of Art Historians, Rudolf Wittkower

Phaidon, Meyer Schapiro

Donald Judd was an artist focused on minimalism, using industrial materials for his objects and installation pieces.

Before his passing in 1994, Donald Judd outlined how he wanted his spaces and works to be preserved, and laid the groundwork for the Judd Foundation. Above are images from his studio in SoHo, which after his death became part of the Donald Judd Foundation. In 2013, certain parts of the space were opened to the public.

Judd sketched the rough ideas for Dinner Service in 1989, but the project was completed by the Judd Foundation in a partnership with the silversmith Puiforcat, and was finally released in 2023.

Selected works by Donald Judd:

References:

David Zwirner Gallery, Donald Judd

Judd Foundation

Donald Judd Library

Donald Judd Dinner Service

In 1970, Dieter Rams published the “10 Principles of Good Design.” Each principle he created was a question that he would ask himself during his design process. He created these principles as a response to high consumerism in the '70s, to ensure that everything he designed was functional, long-lasting, and used as few parts as possible.

I selected a few of my favorite Dieter Rams objects that he designed at Braun. The top left image is the Braun TP1, which was both a portable transistor radio and record player that he designed in 1959. The top right image shows the Braun TP1 in use with a record. The bottom left image is a Braun T41 battery-powered exporter radio, which was designed in 1962. The bottom right image is the Braun Audio 1, which was a hi-fi sound system (made to feel as though you're hearing the actual performance as it was performed live). He designed this around 1962.

In 1960, Dieter Rams designed the 606 Universal Shelving System for the German furniture company Vitsœ. He designed four pieces total for the furniture company including the 602 Table, 621 Table, 620 Chair Programme, and the 606 Universal Shelving System.

And lastly, Dieter Rams’s “10 Principles of Good Design.”

The Golden Ratio was the mathematical concept that Le Corbusier used to create his Modulor System to connect proportion to human emotion. The Modulor System is a universal scale of proportions based on a 6-foot human body, and is also based on the Golden Ratio which is a mathematical concept that dates back to 300 BCE.

Le Corbusier described the Modulor as a tuned piano. He used this metaphor to explain that just as music notes need the right spacing between them to sound good together, buildings need the right proportions and spacing in order to feel good.

My favorite example of Le Corbusier using his Modulor System to provoke emotion is the Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut.

This building particularly inspired one of my favorite architects, Tadao Ando. His Church of Light was heavily inspired by Le Corbusier's Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut.

Le Corbusier was considered to be a dogmatic modernist. Philosopher Wayne Booth used the idea of dogmatic modernism to critique how being skeptical has become a dogma (dogma essentially means beliefs set by authority that are absolutely true without doubt). Wayne Booth argued that modern intellectualism assumes “…the only correct way to think is to doubt everything, reducing human values to mere matters of personal preference and rejecting any shared sense of truth.” This paradox was also described by Rene Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Le Corbusier believed so strongly in the importance of mathematical harmony that he created the Plan Voisin. This was his plan to destroy all of the buildings in Paris, and rebuild them to look like the image below.

My June Book Rotation:

The interesting through line with my reading is that each of these books has been translated from their original language. War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann was written in German, Immortality by Milan Kundera was written in Czech, and The Castle by Franz Kafka was written in German.

My favorite poet, Ingeborg Bachmann wrote a beautiful autobiography about her experience growing up in Klagenfurt, the capital of the Carinthia region in southern Austria during World War II. It consists of her memories, the letters sent to her and each dream she dreamt between.

Though I have found this book to be somewhat complex in its structure, Kafka builds an other worldy realm reminiscent of Narnia, I have truly enjoyed decoding his clever twists.

After reading the Unbearable Lightness of Being, I fell in love with Milan Kundera’s existential and deeply philosophical way of writing. I decided to pick up his book Immortality and it has been a pleasure to read so far.

It is important to note that high modernism has two definitions across disciplines.

In sculpture, high modernism is linked to the peak of modernist experimentation. This meant that artists were actively breaking traditional forms of art in order to challenge the industrializing world.

In architecture, high modernism refers to a utopian vision of society built on minimalist, geometric, and functional structures made from industrial materials like steel and glass. High modernism is also based on anti-humanist proportions, which are spaces created to cater to human efficiency instead of the comfort of the individual.

There is a strong tension between art and architecture because Brâncuși was the touchstone for high modernism’s approach to abstraction. Le Corbusier, among other architects, took that level of abstraction to an extreme through high modernism. Tom Sachs critiques the high modernism that Brâncuși laid the groundwork for, and Le Corbusier elevated.

Tom Sachs was also heavily inspired by Brâncuși’s idea of integrating the pedestal in which the sculpture is placed into the art itself.

Sachs’s sculpture titled VX 1000 clearly reinterprets the curvature in Brâncuși’s pedestal.

Sachs repeatedly references Brâncuși. In 2016, Sachs recreated Brâncuși’s sculpture The Kiss.

Brâncuși defied the U.S. governments legal definition of art, which required sculptures to realistically mimic natural objects. His work may appear understated, but his understanding of form and the power of stripped down raw objects laid the groundwork for sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi. After Noguchi saw Brâncuși's work in 1926, Noguchi traveled to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship and worked alongside him. Brâncuși taught him the purity of abstraction. Brâncuși also inspired modern sculptor Tom Sachs and singer Frank Ocean. Sachs spoke about the inspiration Frank Ocean took from Brâncuși when making the film for his album Endless. During the film, Frank Ocean worked alongside Tom Sachs to build what Sachs called the Stairway to Heaven.

The stairway Tom Sachs and Frank Ocean built was a refrence to Brâncuși’s 1937 sculpture Endless Column which depicts rhomboids transcending into the sky.

Another element of Brâncuși’s work that Tom Sachs took inspiration from was the pedestal. Brâncuși was the first sculptor to make the pedestal on which the sculpture rested a part of the art itself.

After leaving the internment camp George bartered for land in New Hope Pennsylvania. He started building his home for his family in 1946 using fallen trees, and he used reinforced concrete for the ceiling. Reinforced concrete was a very popular material at the time. Nakashima was largely inspired by Le Corbusier’s Pavillion Suisse located in Paris. Nakashima stumbled across the Pavillion Suisse during his time studying architecture at the École Américaine des Beaux-Arts.

Nakashima was also close friends with the Japanese Modernist architect Junzō Yoshimura, alongside the iconic Isamu Noguchi. Junzō, similar to George, was adamant on paying close attention to the design of the exterior just as much as the interior, where he carefully designed objects to sit in his spaces. Junzō was known to design from the inside out, a characteristic both him and George shared.

George Nakashima wanted every piece to have his touch. Leaving the natural edge on his pieces required a highly selective process of the wood he would use, traveling the globe to hand-select unique trees from forests particularly the Persian Walnut found in forests in Iran. George’s highly intensive work ethic and discerning way of building objects was his way of maintaining tradition during a period where everything could be done by factories.

In 1975, George asked his grandchildren to write their names using deep blue tiles near the sunken tub that sits in his house.

George’s legacy has lived on through his daughter Mira Nakashima, who currently still works out of the same home her father built for her eighty years ago. Mira works the same way George did, humbly and with utmost devotion and care.

Creative director Matthieu Blazy has been quietly brightening Chanel, and fine tuning its whimsy. The immersive sounds and set of Chanel’s SS26 show was accompanied by the warm voices of musical artists Le Motel and Michel Gaubert. Matthieu’s vision is one of a film-maker, delicate, thoughtful, but provokes or reminisces on one very poignant emotion.

“Just Dance” pulsed through the runway at Chanel FW26. It was electric and free. The movement, and childishly bright colors, feel almost uncomfortable to gaze at. Yet, the rhythm and static feeling the show evokes; makes it difficult to tear your gaze away.

And lastly,

Snug, worn in, your eyes catch the corner of the room where this familiar object sits, but the feeling its hollow plaster holds is ambiguous.

“Capriole” by Patricia Powers, 1983

Schiaparelli Couture SS26 bird shoe

Cy Twombly Roman Notes

Daphne Groeneveld in L’Ange for Numéro #126 photographed by Peter Lindbergh

Helene Schjerfbeck

The sharp faces of Helene Schjerfbeck, each woman she paints captures an innate sense of expression, a woman alarmed by something in the distance, but calmly gazing at it as such an object approaches her. The face of bewilderment yet without fear, an expression only a woman with confidence could hold.

“Portrait Of Gota”

Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer

The gentle expression carried in each visible stroke of oil paint, there lies something in the essence of this painting felt like the childlike excitement of running down hills, open and curious. But here it is expressed through a dogs return, a vulnerable yet innocently helpless animal making its sweet hobble back home.

A Humble Return

Caravaggio

Each expression Caravaggio crafted carried a certain essence, you weren’t supposed to see this, but it is as if you are staring through the eyes of a familiar man who had just walked in, something feels extraordinary, the camaraderie of all of these men gathered up together.

The Musicians

Daniil Volkov

The contemporary impressionist, captures beautiful landscapes with what seems like a few dabs of his brush, but the longer one looks, the greater detail and texture you observe, the way light reflects off the buildings, and the deep layers of blue layered on the nights sky.

City Lights

Authors

Haruki Murakami:

South of the Border, West of the Sun

• Murakami’s writing offers a hand into a world that floats just inches off of land, he sews worlds together without you even noticing until it’s over. In South of the Border, West of the Sun Murakami explores the most human desire, to see and to be seen.

Milan Kundera:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

• Deeply intertwined in philosophy, Kundera tells a story of two people, Tomas and Tereza. The novel rewinds, and forces you to focus on certain points, drags it out, then asserts the significance that only a reader who hung onto each word could understand the reason the author dragged you through such a bizarre series of events. The novel makes you feel the chances that something will happen, the closing door of opportunity, truly what are the chances?

Donna Tartt:

The Goldfinch

• You view the heart-splitting journey of a New York City boy into his adulthood, shaken from one exact event in his childhood, he has one item to remind him of the day when everything changed.

  Six months, is how long it took me to fully complete this novel. Starting it in one place, getting through the thick of it on the roofs of Chiang Mai, Thailand, looking out onto the rolling hills in a homestay. The novel held me close, looked me in the eyes, and uttered hatefully truthful words. My one piece of advice, read this novel for as long as you can, soak every sentence in, because each one is pure poetry.

Ling Ma:

Bliss Montage

• A collection of short stories, magical realism, with my favorite short story being Peking Duck. It is a beautiful collection of short stories that captures the twisted reality we live in, but in a way that makes it impossible to stop reading, each page is nearly unpredictable, which is what makes Ling Ma’s writing so fascinating. She will capture you in one world, then the next moment spin you around into the next in an applaudably graceful manner.

Films

Akira Kurosawa

Dreams

• Kurosawa’s ideas revolve around movement, keep the eye engaged, keep each shot a frame to admire, and most importantly, keep your curiosity. Dreams explores the confusing world through the values of an innocent young child.

Sofia Coppola

Somewhere

• After reading through the entire Sofia Coppola Archive book, Somewhere was the film that stood out immediately. It unveils the fragile relationship between a father and his daughter, but what happens when that fragile relationship is exploited by Hollywood? When, instead of the father being the steady, stable figure, the daughter is the one that he leans on. It all happens in the beautifully captured Chateau Marmont. In the daytime, dull and stale yellow walls are visible as sunlight pours through the hotel room. While beaming neon lights that glow ominously in the night and draw in a curious crowd. Not to mention the soundtrack of Somewhere, in my favorite scene (at the pool) at the Chateau Marmont, Julian Casablancas “I’ll Try Anything Once” softly plays as father and daughter play tea party underwater.

  

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Sofia Coppola

The Virgin Suicides

• Eerie, yet captures the unseen, unheard pains of being a young girl, the power that holds all them together, falls apart after the youngest sister Cecilia makes her choice first. The film itself is written and designed in such an alluring manner, the color palette, tone of speech, but most interestingly, the dread. The curiosity and horror that silently plays out in the film, leaves you thinking. Just as the neighboring boys in the film have an undying curiosity and urge to fix up an image of how they did what they did and why, they were left to run in circles. The alluring Lisbon sisters, not disturbed by the most painful things, and not just them, even their parents refuse to shed a single tear throughout the entire film. The Virgin Suicides allows you to experience the world through the onlooker’s eyes, but keeps you drawn into decoding their experience. An impossible goal. Unsettling, beautifully composed, and leaves you with nothing but questions.

Peter Weir

Dead Poets Society

• O’ Captain, my Captain. Each boarding school boy, with his own fascination to tear away from his life and create something new, with a teacher different from the rest, who teaches them to be utterly themselves. Robin Williams who plays Mr. Keating the professor, who becomes the funnel in which these boys pour out their unheard desires for life. He teaches them to embrace themselves, and of course to seize the day.