Event: HEL/LO – Let’s Talk – 24 May
Thursday 24 May, 6–9 pm
The Gopher Hole
350–354 Old Street,
London, EC1V 9NQ
Blueprint and The Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce a series of four events called HEL/LO – Let’s Talk. They will bring together architecture and design professionals from London and Helsinki for a lively discussion and exchange of ideas throughout the year. The [...]
The Shard
This Month, Blueprint focuses on the Shard. Architect Renzo Piano has transformed the London skyline with 306m, 87-storey tower that sets a precedent for high-rise in the capital. Herbert Wright talks to the architect and tells the story of this towering achievement that has already divided opinion across the city.
To accompany the issue, architectural photographer [...]
In Numbers at the ICA
Self-publishing has never been more accessible than it is today thanks to the internet and the availability of digital printing. So, in many ways, In Numbers is a timely exhibition and book as it charts the growth of publications produced by artists since the Fifties to the present day.
From the rise of the small press [...]
Jólan van der Wiel’s Gravity Stools
Amsterdam-based designer Jólan van der Wiel delights in calling his products ‘freakish and organic’ and he’s not wrong. They also beg the question, ‘How on earth did you do that?’ The answer, magnetism.
Essentially, for his stools, van der Wiel mixes a large amount of iron filings – around 6kg – with some liquid plastic, then [...]
Josep Lluis Mateo’s Filmoteca de Catalunya
‘It was clear to me that the contemporary architecture in the area was unsuccessful. It ruined it. The buildings have a certain mass and density that makes them seem fragile and uninteresting in the wider context. All these appear totally lost and boring.’ Architect Josep Lluis Mateo, sat in his office in a northern suburb [...]
Review: David Shrigley at the Hayward Gallery
‘I wanted to call it “Fancy rooms filled with crap”,’ muses David Shrigley at the opening of his latest exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘but they said no.’ However, the show’s eventual title, Brain Activity, is rather apt, as it opens a window on to the artist’s methods of working.
Principally known for his drawings, Shrigley [...]
Book: Weather Architecture
Weather Architecture acknowledges the creative stimulus of inclement weather in the emblematic Rousham Garden by architect William Kent (1685-1748), whereby Jonathan Hill portrays the sense of the picturesque and rural idyll that pervades it.
Here the English empirical garden transcended the ancien régime by mixing allegory from ancient Rome with gothic and Arcadian symbols referring to [...]
Book: The Architectural and Cultural Guide Pyongyang
German architect and publisher Philipp Meuser describes Pyongyang, the North Korean psycho regime’s capital, as ‘arguably the world’s best-preserved open-air museum of socialist architecture’. This publication offers a solid armchair trip through it. Volume 1 has photographs and descriptions furnished by the official Pyongyang Foreign Publishing House, without critical comment, but Volume 2 includes critical [...]
The Dellow Centre by Featherstone Young
Tim Brotherton
Just off Brick Lane, on Wentworth Street in London’s East End, is the Dellow Centre, new premises of the charity Providence Row that supports the homeless in Tower Hamlets and the City of London. London-based architect Featherstone Young has just completed a new arts and activity building on a site opposite the charity’s exisiting [...]
Science Practical
As a practice that prides itself on impacting on, but also extending beyond, architecture, the Dutch practice UNStudio has long had a resolute approach to the architectural discipline that stressed the importance of research and testing. What started as an art historian-architect collaboration between Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos 24 years ago has eloquently morphed into [...]
Failing to Succeed
Aside from hardline left-wingers, no one would probably claim wholeheartedly that the failure of the big banks and massive bailouts in 2008 that led to rising unemployment, among other things, was a good thing. Can failure ever be for the good? It’s difficult to come to a conclusion because nobody likes to talk about their failures. The public [...]
Flight Assembled Architecture
Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile-High City, architectural visions of self-contained, mega-scaled vertical cities have rarely gone far from the drawing board. However, one has just physically arisen, spectacularly and in public.
A fleet of 20 flying robots built a 600m-high vertical village – well, a 1:100 scale model anyway – designed by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, both [...]
The Bouroullec Brothers: Fox and Hedgehog
In a bizarre and endearing moment of self-definition, the Bouroullecs once described themselves the ‘Fox’ (Ronan) and the ‘Hedgehog’ (Erwan), employing philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s categorisation of intellectuals, which divides them into ‘Foxes’, who know ‘many things’ and ‘Hedgehogs’, who know ‘one big thing’.
We used this as our starting point…
The Fox: Ronan Bouroullec
The elder of the [...]
YAA Centre by Foster Wilson
The Notting Hill Carnival now attracts more than a million people to the streets of west London to join in what, after Rio’s, is the world’s largest street festival. It is one of the most diverse and exciting spectacles of social solidarity in the capital, and estimates say the annual event injects more than £90m [...]
New Money
What do Elizabeth Fry, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Sir John Houblon, Matthew Boulton and James Watt have in common? Have a look in your wallet and you may well see Fry, Darwin and Smith peering back at you from the fivers, tenners and twenties. You’re probably less likely to see Boulton and Watt as they’re [...]
Terry Farrell: KK100
‘100 bloody storeys! My god!’ exclaims Sir Terry Farrell, full of pride, craning his neck to take in the full 442m height of the just-completed KK100 tower in Shenzhen, China. ‘When something is finished, it takes a while to take it in, particularly when so many don’t get built. Is it real, is it there?’ [...]
SCAD by Christian Sotille
When Union General Sherman led his troops across Georgia in the American Civil War he was not prepared to be moved from his course of destroy-and-conquer by any resisting faction, let alone by a single town’s charm. However, when he arrived in Savannah, instead of razing its buildings like Atlanta before it, he decided to [...]
Urbanized: directed by Gary Hustwit
Following his acclaimed films about fonts and industrial design, Helvetica and Objectified, the final instalment in director Gary Hustwit’s design trilogy focuses on 21st-century cities. Urbanized was conceived in 2007 while Hustwit was on screening tour with Helvetica. ‘I didn’t start these films with a thesis or agenda; they’ve really been explorations into subjects I’m curious [...]
Film: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth directed by Chad Friedrichs
The story of Pruitt-Igoe, the Fifties’ public housing project that Charles Jencks famously used to pinpoint the exact time of modernism’s death, is not a simple tale of blighted aesthetic ideals. Pruitt-Igoe is commonly used to illustrate modernism’s misgivings about public space and private dwellings, which are also attributed to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Now documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [...]
Review: Nano House
‘Small’ can instinctively imply an unappealing, claustrophobic space. However, in Nano House: Innovations for small dwellings, Phyllis Richardson presents a collection of 43 ‘small’ dwellings and examines the feasibility of mini living spaces.
Where space is limited and energy use is a global concern, ‘nano’ houses, with versatility and appreciation for materials in their design, could [...]
