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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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’.
Urban Utopias
A city of artificial hills, with towers peaking above the clouds in permanent sunshine, is the vision drawn by Anna Boldina, winner of Blueprint and the Royal Academy’s Paper City competition. Boldina, who is an urban design graduate from Moscow, has lived in London for one year and was inspired to draw her idea after seeing [...]
The Limiting Vision of Sustainability
The tenor of the conversation in the common rooms and bars around the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University must be pretty bleak, never mind in its lecture halls and laboratories. ‘The last thing I thought I would hear today was technological optimism,’ said Peter Guthrie at a conference last week, entitled Minimum or Maximum Cities, organised by [...]
The 21st Century Virtual House
The creations of David Tajchman could be the next best thing to happen in architecture and design. Among his latest projects is Woody Alien (pictured), an exemplary house for the 21st century: elegant, original and energy-efficient. In addition to his raw talent and ambition, Tajchman also seems to have been fortuitous in meeting the right people [...]
Full Circle on the Underground
For the majority of its patrons, King’s Cross St. Pancras Underground Station is a badly designed labyrinth, a chore to navigate and, on the whole, best avoided. However, the pain that comes from being dragged along its undercurrent of tourists and commuters could soon be relieved after tonight’s unveiling of Full Circle (below) by [...]
Ceramic artist Stephen Dixon at the V&A
When I met Stephen Dixon in his studio at London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum, he had just moved in and was working on a large-scale bust of Queen Victoria. Enlisting the help of the visiting public, the piece has been decorated with broken pieces of crockery. Dixon, who trained as a fine artist at [...]
Constructing an Identity: New Polish Architecture
In August this year hundreds of young Warsovians thronged around a newly refurbished railway kiosk in a run-down part of the Polish capital’s downtown. Once a dilapidated, Communist-era municipal building – typical of Warsaw for its severe steel-frame structure and expressive parabolic concrete roof – the kiosk has been transformed into a café featuring installations, [...]
The Many Lives of Tempelhof Airport
On 20 June this year, 5,000 Berliners attempted to gain access to their city’s famous airport, which had been closed in October 2008. Marching under the slogan ‘Squat Tempelhof’, the stated aim of the demonstrators was to turn the Nazi-built airport over to public use. Their attempts appeared to be a failure. The Squat Tempelhof protestors had handed the initiative to the police when they announced their
One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square
Author Marshall Berman has spent much of his life in or around Times Square. His mother would encourage the family to take a ‘bath of light’ in the Square, and, inspired by James Dean, it was there that he would practice the art of ‘hanging out’. Filled with personal histories, the book leads the [...]
