A Short History of the Highrise: Concrete
This short film is the second part of an Emmy-award-winning, collaborative and interactive "documentary experiment" between the National Film Board of Canada and Op-Docs, the New York Times editorial department’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries. The entire Highrise project spans 2,500 years of vertical living around the world and highlights the social inequalities that rose up among the bricks and mortar. Beginning with "Mud" and ending with "Glass," director Katarina Cizek drew on The New York Times's vast photo archives to tell the story of the highrise and its impact on social history. Part four, entitled "Home," is made up of images submitted by the public, who are invited to explore the documentary's themes further by clicking around the project's main site here. Toronto's Helios Design Labs has served as the project's "house band" throughout its various iterations online, which includes the creation of "One Millionth Tower," the world’s first HTML5/WebGL short film built entirely in code.