(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Meaning of the Olympic Stadium

We would like to invite all Blueprint readers to a public talk by associate editor Tim Abrahams at the newly opened Toto Gallery in Clerkenwell. Inspired by Jeanette Barnes’ incredible landscape drawings of the London Olympic site under construction, Abrahams will discuss the design of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. He will explore how it fits [...]

British Council Blog: IE = HOME

IE = HOME at the Embassy of Japan
In Japanese, the term home is signified by a Chinese character, and is made up of a roof combined with a pig. It reminds us that home is a flexible and historically specific term – in this case it signified a building shared with animals.
The Japanese language does [...]

British Council Blog: Moss Your City

‘Moss your City’ at The Architecture Foundation
On walking into the exhibition, ‘Moss your City’ presents a sensory experience. Hit by the smell and humidity of damp moss that covers the walls, the installation offers an immersive experience that takes you from the busy London street to a mossy garden escape. This warm, green environment invites [...]

British Council Blog: LFA2010

Throughout the duration of London Festival of Architecture, members of staff from the British Council will be producing a blog with information and commentary on the projects which they are undertaking.
The British Council organised The Embassies Project for the London Festival of Architecture in 2008 with 24 countries. This time round the number has [...]

Jeanette Barnes, London sites

Jeanette Barnes: London Sites in association with Blueprint will run from 14 June – 2 July at the Toto Gallery, 140–142 St John Street, London. Tim Abrahams meets the artist to talk about her work and the human aspect of construction.

Jeanette Barnes has yet to get angry with Las Vegas. In her studio in Hackney [...]

Barking Central

Photography  by David Cowlard
The songwriter and Labour activist, Billy Bragg identified his home town of Barking as  the venue for a ‘fight for the soul of the English people’ during the recent election. Sitting right at the heart of this battle ground is a private scheme called Barking Central. Designed by the regular Stirling [...]

Cinematic Architecture

The curvy facade of Studio Gang’s 82-storey Aqua Tower recently took a prominent  place in the skyline of downtown Chicago and helped Jeanne Gang achieve a degree of international renown. On the surface, her latest building, the $21m (£13.6m) Media Production Center for Columbia College, is a more modest street-level intervention in a redeveloping area [...]

Centre Pompidou –Metz

The town of Metz, capital of the Lorraine region of France, lies about and hour and a half east of Paris on the TGV close to the German border. The line arrives at the bulky, brooding, neo-Romanesque train terminal that guards the entrance to the city. To the north, the historic city is a [...]