Anachronistic architectural styles often survive simply because of cultural tenacity-or strong-willed revival. We look at two such anachronistic forms, distant in their locales but not necessarily their motivations. In Gustavo Vazquez's unfettered Free From Babylon (28 mins), Treehouse Joe, an eccentric San Diego naturalist, recycles society's detritus into whimsical, homes. Elaborate treehouses and earth stations, often made with crude tools and archaic engineering, mirror Joe's philosophy of non-interventionist architecture. Craftsmen in the Yemenite town of Shibam have followed a similar ethos, constructing strident clay-brick high-rises for the past 1600 years. Saad Salman's poetic Tell Me Shibam (41 mins) explores these elegant structures by illustrating a Yemenite folktale about a stranger striving to learn the ancient crafts needed to build them. The tale tells us that it requires an empathy for the cycles of nature to stack adobe high into the arid skies.-Steve Seid