(A Bit of) A Nazi In England
Pevsner, the Early Life: Germany and Art
By Stephen Games
In 2002 Stephen Games wrote an article in the Evening Standard about the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, provocatively headlined A Nazi in England. It was extracted from the introduction to Games’s book Pevsner on Art and Architecture: The Radio Talks. In it Games detailed how Pevsner, [...]
Venice: An Overview of the Arsenale
Two years ago, Aaron Betksy was director of the Venice Architecure Biennale. His exhibiiton entitled Beyond Architecture in the Arsenale was over-filled with extravagant structures and over-complicated installations: Nigel Coates presented a saddle, Frank Gehry gave us a truncated version of his tree-trunk-y Serpentine pavilion from the same year. The huge Arsenale, a former rope [...]
Venice: A Glimpse of the Pavilions
As ever, the national pavilions at the Giardini were a spectrum of spectacles: ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. From the outright stupidity of the Polish contribution to the serenely beautiful artefacts exhibited by the Belgians, a quiet tribute to the resiliance of materials and the traces the practice of quotidian life leaves behind. [...]
Best Student Projects in Britain
Welcome to the largest, best overview of architecture and design students work in the UK. This summer, Blueprint commissioned a panel of 16 architects, designers, curators and critics to visit the annual degree shows of 25 top design schools in Britain. More the 60 projects were nominated by the panel for their imaginative takes on [...]
The Most Exciting Design School in the World
Welcome to Strelka, the most exciting new design school in Europe. No, its not big but the recently opened postgraduate institution overlooking the Kremlin in Moscow is guaranteed to provide the most stimulating year of education an architecture student could ask for. Established after a drunken discussion between five Russian friends at the Venice [...]
Venice: The Car-Free City?
Jurgen Mayer Architects were last named the winner of the Audi Urban Futures Award. The award is an innovation was set up by the German car manufacturer to encourage discussions around the relationship between mobility and urban planning. Mayer’s winning proposal posited a future where cars are run entirely on electricity taken from a smart-grid, [...]
Venice: The Big Show Begins.
On the eve of the Biennale, a small corner of Venice, just north of the Arsenale, is bathed in the soft glow of light from the improvised cinema screen. A Russian film is playing and people are sat on a random assortment of chairs or lying on the floor, sweltering in the humidity but enjoying [...]
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
The great mid-20th century photographer Robert Frank said realism wasn’t enough: ‘there has to be vision. The two together make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.’ In other words, photography can be meaningful reportage or art if it is crafted by humanely imaginative [...]
Tel Aviv: Signs of a Normal City
‘I love this city,’ enthused my taxi driver, ‘it’s like New York: 24 hour.’ And keeping up the banter until Ben Gurion Airport, he presented a good simulcrum of a New York cabbie though the statement itself was a touch hyperbolic, considering the scale and physical make-up of Tel Aviv. Its inner-city population is only [...]
Foster in Kazakhstan
Crowning the lavish 70th birthday of Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev on 6 July in his capital, Astana, was the grand opening of Khan Shatyr: a giant, peaked, transparent tent. In this bizarre structure, 10,000 citizens at a time will be able to stretch their legs in the city’s bleak winter, when temperatures drop to minus [...]
The Commercial Games
At first the numbers don’t seem to make any sense. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976 a total of 742 corporations were allowed to advertise with the Olympic Games. By the Sydney Games in 2000 the number was down to 104. The same downward trend is obvious in the number of sponsors: 628 in 1976, [...]
Branded London
London is the youngest city I have ever visited. São Paulo or Lagos may well have a younger population, but I haven’t been there for a while and those cities certainly couldn’t compete with London in a livability test. It certainly isn’t the birth rate that puts all those young people on the streets, into [...]
The Solo by Andrew Cross
‘The Solo’, is the latest film by artist Andrew Cross to celebrate the subject without resorting to seemingly literal visual metaphors. In much of Cross’s work the subject is omni-present by it’s absence, it’s deliberate omission literally burns the retina. In Cross’s own words, ‘if people are looking at something over here, then I choose [...]
T-sa Forum 2010
Toh Shimazaki Architecture Forum
Japan Workshop 201
T-sa forum, an annual architectural workshop initiated and run by London practice Toh Shimazaki Architecture travelled to Tokyo for the first time this spring. Setting up its temporary studio at the British Council in central Tokyo from 29 March to 9 April, the t-sa forum welcomed 16 international students from [...]
The Surreal House
The Surreal House
The image of the home has been traditionally represented within the cultural sphere as the safe haven, a realm of security, stability and comfort. However, The Surreal House capsizes all of these notions. All that is familiar becomes unsettlingly wrung, distorted, melted and torn apart. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and films depict everyday objects [...]
Yii Exhibition
There has been much debate in recent years concerning the emergence of an authentic language for contemporary Asian design. At Milan this year, the Yii exhibition of Taiwanese craft design stood out as having a strong sense of identity and relevance to Asian design’s relationship with the rest of the world.
Housed in the Triennale, and [...]
British Council Blog: Anatomy of a Street
Anatomy of a Street at Church Street, Paddington
On walking down Church Street, through the Market and past the small independent shops, the colour and vibrancy of the area is at once endearing. Anatomy of a Street created a journey to uncover and dissect the area, its inhabitants and activity through a series of small, pop [...]
Blueprint Big Breakfast with Jon Snow
At last Thursday’s Blueprint Big Breakfast, Jon Snow regaled guests in a packed-out Smiths of Smithfields with his views on designing for the deprived, tree-hugging, and the ‘architecture of lunacy’. See below for the the full talk in three parts.
British Council Blog: City Skills for Life
‘City Skills for Life’ at the Romanian Cultural Institute
Lining the walls of the Romanian cultural Institute, hang large photographic displays of gritty urban scenes, mounted on torn and wrinkled paper. The exhibition ‘Innermost Recess’ explores the unchartered territory inside the iconic building that is Ceausescu’s People’s Palace. Architect, Anda Stefan documents and shares this fascinating [...]
British Council Blog: Architecture and its Inhabitants
Images: Stills from another life without Sundays, 2008 (c) Jose Arnaud-bello
‘Architecture and its Inhabitants’ at the Embassy of Mexico
‘Another life without Sundays’ is one of two films screened at the Embassy of Mexico that explores Mexico City using a voyeuristic approach.
Inspired by walks through Mexico City, Architects Jose Arnaud Bello and Sebastian [...]
