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Not far from the glitzy Mediterranean film festival venue of Cannes lies another town with a connection to cinema. There are no stars or red carpet, but La Ciotat has an even longer relationship with film, and boasts the world's oldest surviving movie theater.

Audiences are enthusiastic when the lights go down at the Eden. This historic cinema house has been showing movies for the last 120 years, which makes it the world's oldest cinema still in operation.

The Eden lies smack in the middle of the tiny town of La Ciotat, and in front of the Mediterranean Sea. As the story goes, one half of La Ciotat met the other half on its velvet benches.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

Municipal employee Thierry Mabily says he's a pure product of the Eden. We sneak inside the cinema while a movie's playing so he can show me why.

"It was right here on this second-floor balcony, near that last pillar there, that my mother met my father," Mabily whispers as the film starts. "The year was 1958 and the film playing was The Four White Feathers."

La Ciotat is also the setting for some of the very first moving pictures, recorded by the pioneering Lumiere brothers on their invention, the cinematograph. Building on advances of the day by other inventors such as Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumiere patented their cinematographe, the first portable motion picture camera and projector.

Trarieux says the Lumiere family built a large mansion in La Ciotat when the brothers' father, Antoine, a successful photographer from Lyon, visited and fell in love with the Mediterranean light and color. One of the very first moving pictures, Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat, is said to have astounded Parisians when they saw it in 1895.

"That's the film of my grandmother coming on vacation," says Gilles Trarieux-Lumiere, Louis Lumiere's great-grandson. "Louis Lumiere took his camera, went on the platform and filmed his daughter arriving on the train."

The Lumiere brothers sent photographers carrying their cinematographes across the globe to record scenes of daily life. They were the first to project their films to audiences, in rooms that became known as cinemas. The screenings generated widespread excitement around the new technology.

During its heyday, and before television, the Eden played to packed houses, but by the 1990s, it had fallen into disrepair and closed. The building was nearly demolished, but a committee, led by Jean Louis Tixier, raised funds to save the Eden.

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Cannes film festival director Thierry Fremaux gives a speech at the Eden's official re-opening in 2013. Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

Cannes film festival director Thierry Fremaux gives a speech at the Eden's official re-opening in 2013.

Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

"Cinema should not be watched at home on a TV screen," Tixier says. "Cinema is about people breathing and having emotions together. Cinema is a collective, human experience."

Today the Eden's programming evokes the Lumiere brothers' spirit of exploration and sharing.

An enthusiastic Cesaria Granier has come with her mother to watch a documentary about a young man who sails to France from the Bay of Bengal on a sailboat that is its own ecosystem.

"We don't usually see films like this," says the 12-year-old. "It makes you realize, with ideas and the will, you can do anything."

"My dad was going to play banjo and he never got into it, so he advertised in the Palo Alto newspaper: 'Banjo for sale,'" Kreutzmann says. "One night there's a knock on the door. I open the door and Jerry Garcia was standing there."

A number of years later, Kreutzmann saw Garcia again, playing with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and was "completely taken away." That night, he swore to follow Garcia everywhere. Two weeks later, Kreutzmann got a phone call from Garcia asking if he'd like to be in a band.

"I thought that was a very good idea," Kreutzmann says. "Turned out to be a pretty great idea, don't you think?"

'It Can Be Like Fractals'

In the band's beginnings, altered states of consciousness fueled the Grateful Dead's creativity.

"Well, acid was the most beneficial drug," Kreutzmann says. "I jokingly refer to it as my college education, my graduate school, whatever. If I hadn't taken acid, I just would not be here talking to you today. It opens you up; it lets you see that what you're taught in school or what your parents have taught you, or society lays on you, isn't necessarily all there is to see. Your art can flourish and flourish and flourish. It can be like fractals, your art; it can just keep growing. That's what LSD did for me."

But drugs ate away at the band, even as the Grateful Dead grew into the biggest touring attraction in America.

"When cocaine came into the Grateful Dead, it really hurt us," Kreutzmann says.

Kreutzmann says that 1995, when Jerry Garcia died, "was a terrible year for me. I moved to Hawaii to get healing. I was in a really bad way—"

After a moment, Kreutzmann composed himself.

'He Was My Best Music Teacher'

The drummer and the bandleader had once made a pact: If the Grateful Dead ever came to an end, Bill Kreutzmann and Jerry Garcia would move to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, clean up and go diving. In the end, Kreutzmann moved there alone.

"I thank him. He was my best music teacher," Kreutzmann says of Garcia. "He taught me more about music than anybody else. And not necessarily just in words, but how he played. The way he played, you can learn so much from it. Doesn't matter what instrument you play.

"I [was] a senior in high school when he asked me to join the band; when that phone call came in. I knew how to play the drums just a little bit. I had the desire. The thing he said was, 'Bill, play full value. Make four beats be a really full four beats. Don't rush to the end of the bar.'"

As with tropical trees around the world, the koa forests of Hawaii have been decimated — cut down to make way for sugar plantations and cattle ranches. One company is using an innovative business model to bring back koa forests. The secret is a digital tag that helps track individual trees.

At upscale Hawaiian shopping malls like Kings' Shops, wood from the native koa tree is in high demand. Its color ranges from light to dark brown. Koa's curving lines make it popular for furniture, or ukuleles.

"People love the koa," says John Kirkpatrick, owner of Genesis Gallery. "They like the idea that it only grows here in Hawaii."

He shows me a 3-foot vase made of lustrous koa wood that's priced at $9,000.

Koa is expensive because it's increasingly rare, as most of the native forests have been cut down.

Several projects aim to reforest the Big Island of Hawaii with koa. One of the most innovative efforts is run by Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods.

From an all-terrain vehicle, company CEO Jeff Dunster tours the operation, climbing up steep dirt trails to reach 5,000 feet, toward tall grass overlooking fields of new koa.

Dunster started as a consumer of koa furniture. Then he discovered that he was part of the deforestation problem.

"We wanted to be creative with ways where we could put back forests, leave them intact and make it financially viable for the landowner," Dunster says.

The company's business model relies on investors, who pay around $110 per tree.

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Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods COO Darrell Fox (left) and CEO Jeff Dunster stand beside the massive trunk of an old-growth koa tree. The company aims to grow similar trees from seeds. Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods COO Darrell Fox (left) and CEO Jeff Dunster stand beside the massive trunk of an old-growth koa tree. The company aims to grow similar trees from seeds.

Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Over the next few decades, the trees will be harvested for timber — a potential windfall for investors.

"The historical data shows that koa has appreciated 1,000 percent in the past 10 years," Dunster says.

Money from the investments helps the company buy land and plant koa trees that will never be harvested. The company calls them "legacy trees."

"For every investment tree we plant, we plant three legacy trees," Dunster says.

Chief Operating Officer Darrell Fox gets down on his hands and knees to plant a legacy tree. Next, he pours a little water. Finally, he inserts an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag in the soil next to the tree. The ID helps reassure both investors and conservationists.

"The biggest concern was — how do I know you're not selling my tree multiple times?" Fox says. "And that was one of the reasons we got involved in the RFID tagging program in the first place. So, if you look at the quarter-million-plus trees we've planted out here so far, every one of them has its own unique ID number."

That ID number allows customers anywhere in the world to zero in on specific trees via the Internet.

"The individual tree owner will be able to look at the database and see when the tree was planted, what its mother tree was — the one who provided the seed," Fox says. "They'll be able to see what the weather conditions were at the time of its planting."

Despite these innovations, there is some uncertainty in the process. For one thing, no one has successfully planted and grown koa trees for timber.

Though, people have tried.

J.B. Friday, a forester with the University of Hawaii, says, "I've seen koa plantations that I know the original owner had the idea that he was going to be harvesting trees, and in hindsight, it's not going to happen. So, I guess they lost money on that."

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Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods has created an Internet interface so customers can zoom in and view information about specific Koa trees from their computers. Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods has created an Internet interface so customers can zoom in and view information about specific Koa trees from their computers.

Courtesy of Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods

There are threats from pests and diseases, and the possibility that these newly planted trees won't yield the kind of wood most valued in the marketplace.

Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods advises investors about the risks, including the possibility of a total loss.

Nonetheless, the company already has a waitlist of investors lined up to buy trees for next year's planting season.

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Shanghai is one of the world's most vertical cities, a metropolis where 50-story buildings are routine. At night, the cityscape is so cinematic, it's been featured in both James Bond and Mission Impossible films.

This year, Shanghai Tower, the world's second-tallest building, will open and put an exclamation point on Shanghai's futuristic skyline. The structure, which measures 2,073 feet, is loaded with symbolism.

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Jun Xia, an architect and Shanghai native, gazes up at a circular opening in the roof of Shanghai Tower. The architects hope to create "a vertical urban community" with the new building. Frank Langfitt/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Langfitt/NPR

Jun Xia, an architect and Shanghai native, gazes up at a circular opening in the roof of Shanghai Tower. The architects hope to create "a vertical urban community" with the new building.

Frank Langfitt/NPR

It rises out of Shanghai's riverside financial district, which as recently as the 1990s was a mix of warehouses and open fields, even home to a dairy farm. The tower twists and tapers like a glass and steel geyser hurtling toward the sky – illustrating both Shanghai's and China's ambitions.

The building is so tall – only the Burj Khalifa (2,717 feet) in Dubai is taller — the views can be disorienting. From an observation deck on the 120th floor, visitors can stare down about 600 feet to a neighboring skyscraper, the Jinmao Tower. By comparison, the Jinmao, which opened in 1999 and resembles a pagoda, is taller than the Empire State Building.

On a clear day, you can see more than 30 miles from Shanghai Tower to the East China Sea, says Jun Xia, a Shanghai native and regional design director for Gensler, the American firm that designed the building.

To prevent the building from swaying in heavy winds, workers used a crane to stack steel plates and build a 1,200-ton, tuned-mass damper near the top of the tower. The damper is computerized and surrounded by pistons, which push it in the direction of strong winds to counter-balance their force. Without a damper, the top of the building could sway as much as 5 feet during typhoons, says Daniel Winey, Gensler's managing principal for the Asia-Pacific region.

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It's estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through Shanghai Tower each day. Shen Zhonghai/Gensler hide caption

itoggle caption Shen Zhonghai/Gensler

It's estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through Shanghai Tower each day.

Shen Zhonghai/Gensler

"If you don't have something like this in a building of this height, you can actually get nauseous," says Winey.

Beyond its height, what distinguishes the structure is its design.

Shanghai Tower is a building within a building. The interior — where offices and a hotel will be located — is a cylinder wrapped in a skin of glass and steel, which creates a series of atriums that run up the sides of the structure. An atrium on the eighth floor is a dozen stories tall and has palm trees, granite benches and a panoramic view of the city.

"It creates what we call a vertical, urban community," says Xia.

Once the building is completely open, 20,000 to 30,000 people will pass through each day, says Winey. People can have lunch, grab a coffee or hold meetings in the atriums, called sky lobbies. Winey says the sky lobbies should offer enough amenities that some people won't feel compelled to leave the building during the work day, which will save on elevator rides and electricity.

"It's really more a study in urbanism than anything else," says Winey. "It's taking the ideas of Shanghai, where you have all these little parks and neighborhoods, and (turning it) from a horizontal plane to a vertical plane."

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In all, there are 21 sky lobbies – that's not a typo — which are mostly public space that can't be rented out to make money. Winey says these sorts of design elements ensure a building like this would never be constructed in the United States, because the return on investment would be a long way off.

"From an economic standpoint, it would never pencil out," he says. "I don't think there would be any U.S. developers who would make that kind of investment."

Shanghai Tower, though, isn't a conventional investment. It was built for about $3 billion by the Shanghai Tower Construction and Development Co., a state-owned enterprise. The company declined an interview request from NPR.

The structure, which is ultimately owned by the city, is more than a building. It's a statement, an anchor for Shanghai's showcase skyline and a symbol of China's economic rise. From the government's perspective, given the message it's trying to send to Chinese people and the world, the money is probably worth it.

Shanghai Tower's reign as the world's second-tallest building, though, won't last long. Ping An Financial Center in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen will surpass it when it opens next year.

Yang Zhuo contributed to this article.

urban design

architecture

China