The World’s First Printed Building
In a small shed on an industrial park near Pisa is a machine that can print buildings. The machine itself looks like a prototype for the automotive industry. Four columns independently support a frame with a single armature on it. Driven by CAD software installed on a dust-covered computer terminal, the armature moves just millimetres [...]
Utopian Longings
Paul Goldberger is The New Yorker’s architecture critic and an academic. He’s a New Jersey boy who joined the New York Times in the early 1970s and after a decade of writing about architecture picked up a Pulitzer Prize. For several years he has harboured a desire to write a book for the general public [...]
New Generation
Despite good intentions, few products are successful in combining design, aesthetics and ergonomics in a way that is also friendly to users. The new Generation office chair, just launched in the UK by American furniture company Knoll, can be counted as a rare exception.
Created by New Zealand-based practice Formway Design for Knoll, Generation was four [...]
Museum of Innocence
When I heard that the novel The Museum of Innocence had spawned a real museum, opening in Istanbul later this year to coincide with the city’s Capital of Culture celebrations, I was disappointed. I pictured an intellectual theme park to which fans of Orhan Pamuk’s novels, now translated into more than 50 languages, would make [...]
Attack, Retreat, Defend
Ecobuild 2010 this year will be held at London’s Earls Court from the 2 – 4 March. The program includes exhibitors from large companies such as Rockwool, Sika and Finnforest as well as providing a Green Shoots zone, for smaller entrepreneurs to reveal their products and services. The event will also host seminars and [...]
OMA Remakes Architecture
It could be argued that the recent obsession with the term ‘iconic architecture’ has simplified our understanding of what makes good design. We take it for granted that serious or celebrated architects create architecture of quality even though the sources of their creativity remain elusive and hidden. In some schools of architecture the author’s credentials [...]
Unlimited by Technology
When I ‘inherited’ my first small printing press (as I learnt much later, my father actually liberated the machine – as he called it – from a cellar where it had stood unused for decades) at the innocent age of 12, I knew nothing about design, let alone its specialist domain, typography. I took the press [...]
Kinetic Art of the Future
Like Time Lords, the boffins have regenerated… and this time, they’re artists! That’s one conclusion to draw from the Kinetica Art Fair , (4 – 7 February), dedicated to kinetic, cybernetic, electronic and light art in the P3 Gallery situated deep in the concrete underbelly of the University of Westminster campus in London. The first [...]
Whiteness, Emptiness, Simplicity
In the prologue to his book, White, Kenya Hara writes: ‘it is my hope that, by the time you have finished reading this book, “white” will look differently to you.’ It certainly does that, perhaps more so for the English speaking readers, as Hara also notes.
This simple essay is filled with reflections on Japanese history [...]
Industrial Craftwork
It was fate that bought together Japanese furniture brand Maruni and London furniture showroom Viaduct at the Milan Salone del Mobile in 2005. The director of Viaduct, James Mair, stumbled upon Maruni’s stand at the show and was impressed by its 2004 Nextmaruni series, a range of furniture by Japan’s leading contemporary designers.
Unbeknown to Mair, [...]
Architectural Sweets
Architect Souhei Imamura is always busy on several projects at once. Apart from teaching at Waseda University, he runs an architectural practice, Atelier Imamu, and collaborates with overseas architects on projects in Tokyo, most recently on a house with Felix Claus (see Blueprint March 2008). One of his more unusual collaborations has been with the [...]
Ghostvillage
In the January issue of Blueprint, we included graffiti artist collective Agents of Change in our list of 25 who will change architecture and design in 2010. For its Ghostvillage project in October 2009, the group created paintings on the walls throughout the abandoned village of Polphail in south-west Scotland. The project was carried out [...]
Farshid Moussavi in Conversation
Architect Farshid Moussavi will be joining Blueprint’s assistant editor Peter Kelly in conversation next Tuesday at Asia House, London. Iranian-born Moussavi is co-founder of award-winning architecture practice Foreign Office Architects (FOA), professor of architecture at Harvard University and author of the books The Function of Ornament and The Function of Form.
FOA’s past work includes the [...]
A Life Drawing
This evening, architect Nicholas Grimshaw will give a talk at the Royal Academy on the the important role that drawing plays in his design practice. The event is part an ongoing exhibition at the RA, entitled Capturing the Concept: The Sketchbooks of Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, which is also accompanied by the publication that features a [...]
Typeface Architecture
‘If You Could Collaborate’, an exhibition that opens tomorrow night at the A Foundation Gallery in London, features work that marries the creative talents of industries that do not normally have an opportunity to interact. As part of the show, graphic designers Praline, who have worked with clients including Coca-Cola and ICI, chose to work with the model shop of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners Architects.
The Hammer and Sickle Canteen
In spring 2007 I went to Samara, a city some 500 miles south east of Moscow on the Volga River, to look at the Maslennikov factory canteen (1930-1932) by one of the few female architects of the Soviet avant-garde, Yekaterina Maximova. It has a ground plan in the form of a hammer and sickle and, [...]
New Year, New Order
Back in 1999, lots of people were afraid of the Millennium Bug. They thought (or were being told by the computer industry) that at midnight on 31 December, all the systems would crash and our world, totally dependent on computers as it is, would come to a halt. That didn’t happen. Most of us also [...]
Less is Less
The second floor of London’s Design Museum is currently occupied by two exhibitions: Ergonomics: Real Design, and Less is More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams. The first one takes up about one quarter of the floor space; the second extends over all the rest. This disparity is immediately striking. Is it intentional? Is there some [...]
Change in 2010
In the run up to the general election, the term change will be much used and abused at Westminster. As Brendan O’Neill, editor of the independent political site, Spiked, points out, Gordon Brown used the word nearly 50 times in his speech to the Labour Party Conference; Peter Mandelson used it 38 times, and David Cameron has claimed to be launching a ‘movement for change’.
The Expert View
In addition to our own choices, Blueprint asked three experts in the fields of Technology, Architecture and Urbanism and Product/Furniture design to look ahead and make recommendations for the people they think will make a difference in 2010.
