Architectural Lottery

Rem Koolhaas, along with his OMA cohort, were hard to miss in October as the month saw the opening of their Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow and a mighty exhibition of work-in-progress at the Barbican, London. With the Rothschild HQ nearing completion in the City of London the Dutch practice has been busy in London since [...]

Call For Entries: Designers in Residence 2012

Blueprint has joined forces with the Design Museum for this year’s Designers in Residence and the call is going out now for applicants. The scheme gives recent graduates – within the past five years – a chance to explore work around a given theme and grow as a designer, with a bursary provided by the [...]

Asif and Pernilla

Asif Khan is a young architect in an enviable position. He’s been hailed by Design Miami 2011 as a ‘Designer of the Future’, written up in the New York Times as one of five designers to watch this year, and awarded a prestigious ‘designer in residence’ slot at the Design Museum – the first architect [...]

Rebuilding Tatlin’s Tower

Vladimir Tatlin never got to build his full 400m-high Tower to the Third International in St Petersburg. Jeremy Dixon, on the other hand, has managed to build it twice, albeit rather smaller and in London.
A decade before he co-founded the practice Dixon Jones to regenerate the Royal Opera House, he worked on a 10.5m-high model [...]

Foster on Prouvé

There was a time in our evolving society when the making of things was considered not only honourable but was inextricably linked to their aesthetics. Perhaps, in retrospect, that is why we see integrity and consistency in the work of those individuals who were raised in the craft tradition.

Like Mies van der Rohe, whose knowledge of [...]

Biomimcry in Architecture

A few months on from the 10th anniversary in March of the Eden Project, Michael Pawlyn, one of its central architectural actors, has published a book on the ecological philosophy at the heart of the strange and exciting plant-filled biomes.
Biomimicry in Architecture is a primer to an all-encompassing way of approaching building culture. It steps [...]

Terence Conran Exhibition: Win Tickets and Books

The Design Museum marks Sir Terence Conran’s 80th birthday with a major exhibition that explores his unique impact on contemporary life in Britain. Through his own design work, and also through his entrepreneurial flair, Conran has transformed the British way of life. As well as this, his design studio and architectural [...]

Keith William Architects: Marlowe Theatre

Christopher Marlowe is arguably Canterbury’s most famous son, the Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of William Shakespeare who was stabbed to death in a bar-room brawl in Deptford, south London, at the age of 29.
The Marlowe Theatre has now switched on the lights and opened its  doors following an extensive redesign, almost an entire rebuild, by Keith Williams [...]

OMA/Progress

One have might forecast that an exhibition surrounding OMA, the world’s most self-critical architecture practice, was never going to just another homogeneous exhibition. Indeed, at the moment of approaching the Barbican’s illusive west entrance – originally conceived as the entrance to the art gallery but never used – there is a sense that any other [...]

Out and Down In Paris

Filmmaker and artist David Lynch has applied his idiosyncratic vision to designing a Paris nightclub, a departure from film-making that’s not as far-fetched as it first appears. Silencio in Paris, which opened in September, is inspired by the identically named Club Silencio, which is a key location in his critically acclaimed film noir from 2001, [...]

Post Modernism: Style & Subversion

According to Charles Jencks, who Blueprint labelled the ‘pope of postmoderns’ back in issue 2, modernism died on 16 March, 1972, with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igo housing estate in Missouri. Allesandro Mendini decided he was through with modernism in 1974 when he photographed a quasi-ritual burning of the Monumentino da Casa chair and placed the [...]

Forgotten Spaces

Reintroduction of Atlantic Salmons, Urban Physic Garden, underground climbing facilities and above all low rent studios in church spires. Everything could happen in London if you look at the proposals gathered under Somerset House’s roof.
RIBA received 138 responses to their open competition aiming to find the most creative designs that would reclaim forgotten parts of [...]

Shape to Fabrication

The fourth edition of the Shape to Fabrication Conference will kick-start on 14 November with a new addition to the programme – a series of four workshops exploring digital fabrication and advanced computational techniques.
Shape to Fabrication is a yearly conference for the architecture, construction and engineering industry concentrating on issue of manufacture of elaborate elements [...]

Critical Discourse

Once I know what topic I want to (or have to) write about, the most critical decision becomes inevitable: how to begin? No evening class in Creative Writing, no journalism course fails to mention how important the first sentence is for the impression a text makes upon the unprepared reader. Norbert Miller, a German literary [...]

Maggie’s Centre Nottingham: CZWG and Paul Smith

CZWG and Paul Smith have completed their Maggie’s centre in Nottingham after an 11th month construction period. Maggie’s Nottingham serves the Mid Trent Cancer Network and is situated next to the Breast Institute at Nottingham City Hospital. The Mid Trent Cancer Network covers the populations of Nottingham, North Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire – approximately 1.3 million [...]

Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby: Ascent

It’s been a vintage year for British design duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby; in the spring their first monograph was published by Rizzoli, which was followed a couple of months later by the unveiling of the 2012 Olympic torch, and now a solo exhibition at London art gallery Haunch of Venison.
Titled Ascent, the show [...]

The Power of Making

Walking into the Power of Making at the V&A comes as a bit of a shock. The place is stuffed to the gills with an eclectic range of objects, from a crocheted, full-size bear and a cake that looks like a real baby to a prosthetic leg and a Fabrican spray-on dress. The walls are [...]

Going With the Grain

This October, one of the principal buildings of the King’s Cross masterplan opens its doors to 4,500 students. Central St Martins is one of the most famous design schools in the world, with an illustrious alumni including artist Sir Peter Blake, fashion designer Stella McCartney and Pulp vocalist Jarvis Cocker. The school is moving nearly [...]

King’s Cross Reborn

London is an amorphous organism, spreading and shifting over the landscape, expanding and contracting in waves of development; building up a residual history of material and architectural languages, creating districts of prosperity and pockets of desolation. Architects, planners and developers regularly seize upon parcels of land and even whole districts to insert urban models that [...]

Ways Of Hearing

Sound enhances the way we perceive and understand space. In the city it does this by connecting the realm of public space to the private and intimate space of our minds. Sound gives any space, interior or exterior, its identity and is an important navigation and orientation tool.
Yet actually identifying a space aurally is difficult, [...]