Bluerprint Blue Movies – Number 1
Best of Student Shows 2012
This year the Blueprint team and a panel of 14 critics traveled to student degree shows around the country. After viewing hundreds of presentations from a diverse range of disciplines, we have compiled our findings, bringing you some of this year’s best work from the designers and architects of the future.
Here, the graduates explain each [...]
Blueprint Meets Lomokino: The Movies
In collaboration with Lomography, Blueprint handed four Lomokino movie cameras to a bunch of handpicked creatives and gave them one theme: ‘Inside Out’. These are the results…
Rachel Whiteread at the Whitechapel Gallery
It’s been 110 years in the making for the facade at the Whitechapel Gallery in London to be completed. Finally, with the help of British artist Rachel Whiteread, the Gallery has decorated the recessed plaque between the two terracotta towers on Whitechapel High Street with golden leaves cast in bronze. The original Charles Harrison Townsend [...]
New Designers – Discounted Ticket Offer
New Designers, an annual showcase of up-and-coming creative talent, returns to the Business Design Centre in Islington, north London next week, and the organisers are kindly offering readers of Blueprint a 25 per cent discount on tickets.
The show is in two parts with part one taking place between 27 and 30 [...]
Books: Zaha Hadid and Alberto Kalach, Inspiration and Process
Designed in Moleskine’s iconic style that has long been appreciated for it’s pure material beauty, a new architecture series, Inspiration and Process, features sketches by four renowned architects and practices: Bolles+Wilson, Giancarlo De Carlo, Zaha Hadid and Alberto Kalach. Covered in light grey cardboard tied with Moleskin’s signature elastic strap, the books feature each architect’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Future Memory Pavilion
Future Memory Pavilion, an installation by Asif Khan and Pernilla Ohrstedt, is unveiled today as the Future Memory in Singapore, as the platform for promotion of British architects and designers, culminates.
The Future Memory Pavilion comprises of two cones stretching up to eight meters high and 20 meters in diameter. Made of ice and sand, the [...]
The Best of Look Again
Thanks to everyone who visited our stand at 100% design this year and designed their own sign. We had hundreds of entries and here we bring you the ones that really caught our eye.
Look Again
Blueprint asked a series of designers, artists and architects to redesign the British roadsign. The response was diverse and thought-provoking, challenging the role of the ubiquitous notices and the type of commands we receive.
When was the last time you looked at a road sign? No, really looked? These ubiquitous parts of the urban fabric, order, [...]
The Use of Ornament
Ornament vs. Structure! Art vs. Kitsch! Intellectuals vs. Taxi drivers! Tanktops vs. sunrise frocks! These were the vital questions wrestled with at the ICA when they hosted the ‘What is the Use of Ornament in Contemporary Art and Architecture?’ discussion on September 1st.
Artist Grayson Perry, celebrated for his vases and dress-sense, was the first to [...]
