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It’s that time of the year again, New Yorkers and Christmas lovers are ready to gaze at the magnificent lighting of Rockefeller Christmas tree.

Standing 74-feet-tall with more than 50,000 multicolored LED lights is the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. This year the tree will be topped with a Swarovski star, which which was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.

“The Today Show’s” Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, Al Roker and Craig Melvin are all set to make an appearance at the two-hour special titled “The 92nd Annual Christmas in Rockefeller Center,” along with other celebs. Plus, Kelly Clarkson is running it back for a second time as host.

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When does the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting start?

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting will broadcast live on NBC at 8 p.

Vienna-based Autlook has boarded sales on the Danish docu project “Architecture as Invention” in which seasoned doc filmmaker Michael Madsen shares existential and creative conversations with U.S./Polish star architect Daniel Libeskind.

The IDFA Forum Pitch entry is Autlook Film Sales’ third Madsen doc pick-up after his multi-awarded “Into Eternity,” IDFA Green Screen Doc winner in 2010, and Sundance 2015 selected “The Visit.”

“Michael Madsen’s distinguished approach to themes and grand ideas creates films that endure; they are timeless and iconic, always speaking for humanity, much like the architecture of one of the greatest architects of our time, Daniel Libeskind,” said Autlook CEO Salma Abdalla.

A trained architect himself, Madsen has an intimate knowledge of the discipline, explored diversely in his earlier works “Into Eternity,” which delved into the construction of a nuclear waste bunker in Finland, and the 26-minute “Halden Prison,” part of the Wim Wenders-initiated “Cathedrals of Culture.

The Rough Cut Presentations section has expanded, including five additional projects from Ukraine.

IDFA Forum (November 12-15), the co-production and co-financing market of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), has selected its 2023 edition titles, with the likes of Aboozar Amini, Asmae El Moudir and Michael Madsen returning with their latest projects to Forum Pitch, while the Rough Cut Presentations section has expanded.

Afghanistan-born, Netherlands-based filmmaker Amini’s Kabul, City In The Wind screened at IDFA in 2018, and is now pitching Kabul, Year Zero, which threads together four vivid coming-of-age stories against the backdrop of war.

After presenting The Postcard at IDFA...

Exclusive: Smithsonian Channel has landed itself a top gun.

Jay Ellis, who plays Lieutenant Reuben Fitch in the Tom Cruise hit Top Gun: Maverick, has signed on to host the second season of the Paramount Global-owned network’s unscripted series How Did They Build That?

The ten-part series explores some of the most incredible feats of engineering from around the world. It will be fronted by Ellis, who also starred in HBO’s Insecure.

The move marks a step up for the docuseries, which did not have a host in its first season.

Season two will continue to cover architectural wonders from all over the world but will have an emphasis on American stories and deconstruct some of the United States’ most amazing structures, including Hearst Tower, Little Island, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Denver Art Museum, Evergreen Point 520 Floating Bridge

International stories include La Tete...

The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation today honored social justice pioneer and sports icon Billie Jean King, actor and author F. Murray Abraham, architect and designer Daniel Libeskind, and philanthropist Gregory Annenberg Weingarten at its 2016 Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards, held in the Great Hall at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. The event was hosted by analyst and reporter Mary Carillo. Scroll down for photos...

Oscar-winner Meryl Streep to also attend this year’s festival.

Oscar-winning actor Tom Tanks is to attend the 11th Rome Film Fesival (Oct 13-26), where he will receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award.

The star of Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump and last year’s Bridge of Spies will also be the subject of a 15-strong retrospective, including Hanks’ work as a director on That Thing You Do! (1996) and Larry Crowne (2011).

“I consider Tom Hanks to be one of the greatest actors of all time,” said the festival’s artistic director Antonio Monda.

“His extraordinary talent and profound humanity make him a classic but always contemporary actor: his films and his performances will never be dated.”

Fellow Oscar-winner Meryl Streep is also set to attend the festival where she will talk about the great Italian actresses who influenced her, including Silvana Mangano.

In addition, screenwriter and director David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross) will be the subject...

On Monday night, I arrived at what turned out to be incredibly early for a screening of The Walk. After about an hour of sitting in a corner and staring at my phone, I finally made my way into a seat at the front of the theater, where I was greeted with an IMAX-size projection of the movie's poster. With no one to talk to, and my phone's battery rapidly depleting, I began gazing at this image like a lifeline. I was not just a lonely man conspicuously underdressed for an event also attended by Robert Zemeckis and Daniel Libeskind; I was a lonely man who was also very interested in New York City geography, and for some reason, I found it very hard to get my bearings. Take a look for yourself: Which way is north? Ordinarily, the Hudson River would be an easy guide — the World Trade...

At home with Festa del Cinema Artistic Director Antonio Monda Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

From playing a role in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, having recent Le Conversazioni with Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Sondheim, Zadie Smith, Patrick McGrath, Isabella Rossellini, Salman Rushdie, Julie Taymor, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marina Abramovic and Daniel Libeskind, to co-founding Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, with this year's highlights including Ivano de Matteo's The Dinner (I Nostri Ragazzi) and Lamberto Sanfelice's Chlorine (Cloro), starring Sara Serraiocco - Antonio Monda has done a great deal already. Now, he is appointed the Artistic Director of the Rome International Film Festival.

Isabella Rossellini with Antonio Monda in the Morgan Library & Museum Green Room Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

After Antonio had just returned from the Cannes Film Festival, we spoke about the challenges he looks forward to, how Gay Talese and Jonathan Franzen surprised him, a Renzo Piano connection,...

Hp has joined forces with presenting partner Made in New York Media Center by Ifp (Filmmaker‘s publisher) to present Power Up, a five-day festival of new work and discussions centering around technology and creativity. Of particular interest to Filmmaker readers are events feature 25 New Faces Jessica Oreck and Andrew S. Allen; Paul Trillo’s short, A Truncated Story of Infinity, recently featured at Filmmaker; and a screening of director and Film Fatales founder Leah Meyerhoff’s debut feature, I Believe in Unicorns. Other notable events include an discussion on architecture with Daniel Libeskind and a panel on the VFX of James […]...

Hp has joined forces with presenting partner Made in New York Media Center by Ifp (Filmmaker‘s publisher) to present Power Up, a five-day festival of new work and discussions centering around technology and creativity. Of particular interest to Filmmaker readers are events feature 25 New Faces Jessica Oreck and Andrew S. Allen; Paul Trillo’s short, A Truncated Story of Infinity, recently featured at Filmmaker; and a screening of director and Film Fatales founder Leah Meyerhoff’s debut feature, I Believe in Unicorns. Other notable events include an discussion on architecture with Daniel Libeskind and a panel on the VFX of James […]...

By Erik Butka, Meagan Calnon & Kathryn Anthony

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(Click here for an enlarged version of the infographic)

In recent years, high profile news outlets like The New York Times and CNN have featured architects’ struggles by citing the dire unemployment statistic of 13.9% for recent graduates, the highest of any college major. Many architecture firms are still reluctant to hire new full-time members to their team, and all too often students and recent graduates remain without work. Since approximately 40% of architecture graduates pursue work outside of the architectural profession, and the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (Ncarb) currently reports 26,850 students enrolled in accredited architecture programs, we can assume that over the following years 10,000 students trained as architects will forge their own path in a variety of other occupations.

One of the most creative, high profile fields that can offer an architect a wide range of positions is the film industry.

The 2013 Le Conversazioni literary festival celebrating the relationship between art, architecture, literature, and film began at the Morgan Library & Museum on Thursday, May 9 in New York. Artistic Director of Le Conversazioni, Antonio Monda, discussed with performance artist Marina Abramovic and architect Daniel Libeskind films that influenced their lives and work. Nine clips from the chosen movies, four each, plus one from the moderator at the end, accompanied the sold-out event.

From Abramovic we learn how Willem Dafoe swam his way to become an Antichrist (because he couldn't walk on water this time), how Apocalypse Now can be a holy choice, and how Alain Robbe-Grillet's words lead you down the right corridors. Daniel Libeskind, on the other hand, explains how even without a word of English, Cary Grant, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hitchcock can explain all that's powerful in America.

The Films of My Life...

Getty Protesters have been getting close during the weeks spent camping out in Zuccotti Park.

What’s the deal with sex and romance among the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park? After twenty years, does Pearl Jam still rock? And should Iraq help pay for the Iraq war? A look at the most interesting stories in the Wall Street Journal blogs.

At Zuccotti Park, Love Under the Tarps: Occupy Wall Street is an experiment in communal living, with basic human needs on public display.

Getty Us architect Daniel Libeskind poses prior to the official re-opening ceremony in front of the Museum of Military History in Dresden, eastern Germany, on October 14, 2011.

Dresden–Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind’s newest project is an extension to the German Military History Museum (Mhm) in Dresden, the official museum of the German Bundeswehr that opened last Friday. It was an interesting choice for the master planner for the World Trade Center site, who catapulted to fame in 2001 with his design...

Our young critics competition turned up some fearless talent

What makes a great critic? Lots of things: an eye for detail, an instinct for the right adjective, an empathy with audience and artist. A great critic can make a reader feel that they, too, have been there: watching, listening, holding their breath. A great critic's opinion carries conviction; a great critic loves language. And, in a world where everyone has an opinion, and the means to share it, these qualities matter more than ever: a professional 21st-century critic has to look harder, write funnier, be smarter than anyone else.

So it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it – and somebody has to do it after this generation have had their turn. For the fourth year running, we've been looking for the UK's best young critics. We asked for entries in eight categories, and split those into two age...

Read our top-rated entries to the Guardian's annual competition to find the best young talent in arts writing

Overall Winner

Visual art, under 14

Freddie Holker, 12 – Homage to Lucian Freud, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Disgusting. That's what I'm thinking; that's my gut instinct. It's reminiscent of the swimming-pool changing rooms back at school, where I'm scared to look at anything in case it offends someone. This is the Homage to Lucian Freud, one of Britain's best modern artists, who died on 20 July 2011. Seventeen paintings by Freud are displayed. I'm standing in an eerily plain room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 3,000 miles away from where I'm comfortable.

The only painting I can easily look at is, funnily enough, Naked Man, Back View. The only one that doesn't contain full-frontal nudity offers full dorsal nudity. It shows a fat man plonked on a footstool. His sitting position pushing out roll...

This week's news in the arts

Britain's mall sprawl made a major advance this week when it was revealed the east London district of Stratford had now been completely rebuilt as one giant shopping centre. It's only a matter of time before Westfield Stratford City joins up with Bluewater, the Lakeside and the White City Westfield and London becomes one giant, uncontrollable retail behemoth.

If this is where we're headed, what kind of future does culture predict? Starting with the positive side, the mall is the epicentre of American teen life, as evidenced by Kevin Smith's Mallrats, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Clueless. "I had to find sanctuary in a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength," says Alicia Silverstone. You can guess where she heads. The mall's spiritual side was also explored in Michael Sheen's three-day Passion play this easter, partly staged...

Update: We've omitted a reference made to an individual, who was incorrectly reported to be a participant in this video.

College kids are prurient creatures by nature and even the most prestigious Universities are little more than sex fueled social networks after dark. There's nothing offensive or wrong about it, it's just human nature. But rich college kids rapping is embarrassing at best. This attempt at a jokey video about cunnilingus, straight outta Harvard, includes Dan Aykroyd's daughter and actress Ellen Barkin's niece is a prime example.

Other collaborators on this lascivious travesty called "Pussy Breath," culled from the nation's elite children, include the daughter of World Trade Center architect, Daniel Libeskind, according to Prefix. The central rapper is New York comedian, Matt Pavich. The button nosed brunette with the American flag bra is a Harvard chick too. I almost had a chuckle at the line pussy resume's...

Berlin's new "Topography of Terror" exhibition center documents, doesn't honor, the Gestapo and the SS.

 These were some of the most evil 11 acres in Germany, a place where Nazi leaders hatched plans to terrorize millions as casually as you might send an email. Heinrich Himmler had an office there. So did Adolf Eichmann, the "architect of the Holocaust." It was there that, in a matter of months, German democracy began to crumble.

Sixty-five years on, Berlin has transformed the Topography of Terror, a cluster of buildings that housed the Gestapo, the SS, and other police agencies from 1933 to 1945, into an exhibition space trained on the elaborate workings and aftermath of the Third Reich. The center opens this week. It's the site's first permanent landmark, after more than 20 years of fits and starts, and the problem it confronts is a vexing one for architects: How do you document evil without building a monument to it?...

Daniel Libeskind's new theater is a stage within a stage within a stage. With Ireland's economy in tatters, it's a reaffirmation that even when times are tough, the show must go on.

The opening this week of Daniel Libeskind's new Grand Canal Theatre, a razzle dazzle production in its own right, threatened to upstage the gentle ballet on the building's main stage. With its dramatic, four story glass facade, sharply angled roof line, and turbulent diagonal lines, the debut of Libeskind's latest creation was a major cultural happening for Dublin, a city that's been battered by the economy, and desperately needs something to cheer about.And cheer they did. Ireland's president, Mary McAleese, turned out for the Russian State Ballet's performance of "Swan Lake," along with Irish actor Brendon Gleeson (Hogwart's professor "Mad Eye Moody" in the Harry Potter films) actress Rebecca Miller, and various other luminaries from sports,...

Without a doubt, the physical "Center" of the new Las Vegas superdevelopment CityCenter is a shimmering circular fountain tucked into the glass curves of the anchor hotel Aria. It seems pretty enough until you start to notice something you've definitely never seen before. Was that a hot pink splash? Electric blue? Wait a second--colored water? In the middle of the day? That eye-defying spectacle, and four more like it, are brought to you by Wet, the Sun Valley, California-based design firm that turns natural elements into high-tech entertainment.

Wet's signature work can be found up and down the strip--there are perhaps no fountains more famous than their work at the Bellagio, where streams of water spout high into the air to Frank Sinatra tunes. But when Wet got tapped for CityCenter, its CEO Mark Fuller wanted to do something that would test their creative limits. "Instead of doing one piece,...

In his role of assembling a team of seven world-famous architects (as well as over 200 more design teams) to collaborate on the largest development in U.S. history, there's one question that executive architect Arthur Gensler gets asked the most: How the hell did they not kill each other?

With the stories we hear about the perils of getting one architect to agree with anyone, much less with another architect, you'd think at least one of the half-dozen brand names would have been found impaled on a stake of balsa wood. But it was more like a starchitect love-in as Gensler and four of the design architects for CityCenter exchanged bear hugs and belly laughs in the View Bar at the just-opened Aria earlier today (Helmut Jahn's plane had been delayed, Cesar Pelli was rightfully mobbed by reporters after his speech opening Aria at the press conference, Norman Foster's...

MGM Mirage's CityCenter is claiming itself to be the face of the "new Vegas" when it opens this week. The $8.5 billion, 18 million-square-foot development right on the Strip bucks the mega-resort trend by corralling multiple hotel and residential concepts in one master-planned site. But it's also a revolutionary convergence of starchitects--Daniel Libeskind, Rafael Viñoly, and Norman Foster, just to name a few--who worked together to create a cohesive vision for what might be Vegas' first walkable, urban development. In addition to its long list of sustainable features--many of the buildings nabbed their Leed Gold certification--CityCenter wants to live up to its name, creating a new center for the city. So the 67-acre grounds are studded with public art installations and sculpted into parks and boulevards, not paved with buffets and miles of Fear and Loathing-inspired carpet.

Headed by executive architects at Gensler, the CityCeter project encompasses a jaw-dropping three architects-of-record,...

"Voices of Liberty" is a soundscape of voices of immigrants -- among them Daniel Libeskind, Henry Kissinger, Holocaust survivors, Soviet refuseniks, Rwandans fleeing genocide -- telling stories about arriving in America for the first time. Neil Diamond would approve.

The view from the second floor of the Museum of Jewish Heritage at the tip of Manhattan is spectacular: It faces the Statue of Liberty, who lifts her torch over the harbor, close to Ellis Island, the first landing point for many immigrants to these shores. Overlooking that inspirational scene, a new museum exhibit captures those refugees' voices as they recall seeing America for the first time, as well as the experiences that caused them to flee their homelands and the joy and angst their arrival here engendered.

While the museum is designated as a "Living Memorial to the Holocaust," the exhibit, "Voices of Liberty," is not limited to Holocaust survivors.

Space Man He has created more over-the-top interiors than we can count, from the first Nobu to this year's Academy Awards set to the new Walt Disney Family Museum. How one man's spaces speak to the rest of us. 

Photograph by Jake Chessum David Rockwell breezes through 500,000 square feet of steel skeleton as if the 102-degree Las Vegas sun weren't baking him alive. It has been six weeks since the designer last visited Crystals, the high-end retail arm of CityCenter, Las Vegas's $8.5 billion city-within-a-city. A collaboration among eight architects, it will debut this December after three tumultuous years of construction and near-bankruptcy. In an ambitious attempt to infuse a small dose of highbrow into the city of kitsch, Rockwell's sprawling public interior for Daniel Libeskind's angular structure will be as much MoMA as it is Central Park -- suspended gardens, a floor painting made of flowers, and a...

Starchitect Santiago Calatrava has unveiled a new bridge for Calgary--and the project's naysayers are screaming bloody murder.

Once upon a time, Santiago Calatrava could do no wrong. Where his starchitect competitors like Daniel Libeskind specialized in eccentric designs that made the public uneasy, Calatrava was a crowd pleaser, owing to his soaring testaments to technical wizardry. And then the recession hit, and things haven't been the same. He saw a handful of marquee projects in Chicago and New York either cut back or scrapped. Meanwhile, in Ontario Calgary, he's been embroiled in an ongoing fight over whether the city ought to spend $25 milion on a bridge despite all of the city's other budgetary woes. The new design was just revealed. Rather than quieting the critics, it's merely stoking their ire. An inspiring flight of imagination? Maybe. An enormous Chinese finger trap? Definitely.

In his defense, Calatrava, as the Calgary Herald reports,...

TORONTO -- Leading Canadian architects on Thursday launched an eleventh-hour bid to stop plans to redevelop a major film studio on Toronto's waterfront into a big box site anchored by a Wal-Mart.

"Exploiting that waterfront with large-scale 'black box' facilities and their attendant infrastructure is unthinkable," said Daniel Libeskind, whose architectural design was chosen for the reconstruction of the former World Trade Center site in Manhattan.

Other critics of a proposed rezoning of the Toronto Film Studios complex at 629 Eastern Ave. from industrial to retail development includes Jack Diamond, who designed Toronto's new opera house, and Ken Greenberg, who designed a new master plan for Boston University.

The Toronto Film Studios complex recently hosted Marvel Entertainment's $100 million "Incredible Hulk" shoot in Toronto.

An application to rezone 629 Eastern Ave. already has been denied by the city of Toronto. But developer SmartCenters, a consortium that includes the Toronto Film Studios owner Rose Corp. and developer Mitchell Goldhar, appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board, a provincial quasi-judicial body that rarely denies property development applications.