Charles Gwathmey has held steadfast to the spirit of modernism in his architecture from the day he successfully built his parents' home in 1967 based on the theories of Le Corbusier and American individualism. Avoiding the nostalgia of fashionable postmodernism throughout the eighties, Gwathmey partnered with Robert Siegel, and their firm continues to create innovative houses, corporate, institutional and university buildings across America. This documentary ranges from the deMenil villa on the dunes of Easthampton to their Guggenheim Museum addition. We hear from such leading architects as Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenman, and from filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who describes how a journey through a Gwathmey Siegel house creates the same sense of drama as a well-made movie.

The Making of an Avant-Garde presents the creation and existence of the IAUS in the architectural, cultural, and political climate of the time, from the anti-War riots, the Women's Movement to the Paris May '68 revolution and the crime ridden and the bankrupt New York City of the 70's, through rich and abundant footage. The Institute, founded in 1967 with close ties to The Museum of Modern Art, made New York the global center for architectural debate and redefined architectural discourse in the United States. A place of immense energy and effervescence, its founders and participants were young and hardly known at the time but would ultimately become some of the most influential figures in the field shaping architectural practice and theory for decades. The Institute became the most significant and energetic crossroad in the path of rethinking architecture and the city and it's influence is still felt today.

This film, which documents a controversy over plans to alter the original architectural design of the Whitney Museum of American Art, examines some of the problems raised by the decision, including Modernist and Post-Modernist styles, architecture as art, the responsibility of art museums to the public, and the role of the architect