Neill ’71 Creates Films for National Building Museum Exhibition

The Exhibition: Richard Neill ’71 has created five films for the National Building Museum’s exhibition Designing for Disaster, which examines how we assess risks from natural hazards and how we can create policies and designs yielding safer, more disaster-resilient communities.

Dates and Location: Open through Aug. 2, 2015, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Museum hours are 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. Sundays.

The Artist: Neill is the founder of Adventure Pictures, a San Francisco-based media production company with more than 20 years of experience producing programs, short-form documentaries, and print and web advertising campaigns. As a director of photography, Neill has directed and shot corporate image films for Silicon Valley startups; short-form media for organizations such as Public Architecture, the Nature Conservancy, and the Lemelson Foundation; and television specials for National Geographic Television and Discovery Channel.

The Films: Neill shot five “Expert Spotlights” for Designing for Disaster, which highlights the work of experts who address events such as forest fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Though working in fields as diverse as meteorological prediction, structural engineering, and ecology — with some focusing on prevention and others on rehabilitation — all the experts are concerned with the way natural disasters impact infrastructure and human lives. Designing for Disaster looks at the strategies that planners, engineers, environmentalists, and others are adopting to build safer communities.

Exhibition Reviews: The Washington Post writes, “The exhibit’s most compelling demonstrations show how innovative engineering solutions can reduce the impact of disasters and, in fact, already are.”Landscape Architecture Magazine writes, “It’s as much the story of seismic engineers, researchers, architects, planners, and landscape architects as it is about the disasters themselves, given that the goal is blunting the destructive impacts of disasters.”