Bluerprint Blue Movies – Number 1

Wheely good…

Helping to brand everbody’s favourite  Olympic Velo-pringle, Crystal Computer Graphics created a three-minute Kraftwerk-cum-Tron video to go along with the Chemical Brothers’ venue-specific chewn.
Remember all those graphics zooming across the spectators during the opening ceremony? Well Crystal was also heavily involved in those, not to mention this weekend’s closing ceremony and   Paralympics ones coming in [...]

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 [...]

Olympics 2012: Olympics 2016

A year ago, when AECOM won the bid to master plan the main site of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the proposed development plot was just a disused Formula 1 race circuit. Today, with three years to go until the finishing deadline it’s, well… it’s still covered with an old F1 track.
Time [...]

Olympics 2012: What happens next?

Olympic park 2014
When London dignitaries and sportspeople mounted the podium in Singapore in July 2005 to make their final presentation to
the International Olympic Committee,  it looked unlikely that we’d be celebrating London 2012 – the city’s bid was considered to be a distant second or third behind Paris and Madrid.
London’s surprising win that morning was [...]

Olympics 2012: The Velodrome

The London Velodrome sits poised and elegant on the Olympic stage, ready for the starter’s gun and the world’s cameras; but in architecture terms, the structure is far more method actor than glittering celebrity, as I found out talking to Mike Taylor, who led the design team for Hopkins Architects.
For rather than directing focus to [...]

Call for entries: BE OPEN Awards

Having launched awards schemes in Milan with Create the Future Now! and in Basel with BE OPEN Inside the Academy, BE OPEN has now set its sights on  London. The next awards till be during the London Design Festival this September. See below for details.
Entry Criteria
The awards are open to interdisciplinary designers aged 18-30 from [...]

Blueprint partners with Global Design Forum

Blueprint is the media partner for the first Global Design Forum, taking place as part of this year’s London Design Festival.

Review: Belgrade Design Week

Although it might seem like a paradox, Belgrade Design Week attracts speakers from around the world. This year’s lineup included speakers from a variety of design backgrounds, with some impressing more than others. Herbert Wright reports.

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 [...]

HEL/LO 2 – Let’s Talk About Games – 6 July

To coincide with the London Festival of Architecture, the Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce the second event in a series of four design discussions titled HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Games.

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 [...]

John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library

John Madin, Birmingham’s most famous 20th-century architect, would surely have loved Architex. It was a construction set for children, of all ages, made in England in the Sixties. I had one. Yellow plastic I-beams could be clipped together with clear plastic joints to create the frames of sub-Miesian or sub-SOM-style office blocks. With plasticised cardboard [...]

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 [...]

Review – Eames: The Architect and the Painter

It all began with the moulded plywood chair. Voted by Time Magazine as the greatest design of the 20th Century, and conceived for a competition at MoMA in 1940 with Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames attempted to reinvent the very idea of the chair. They wanted to mass-produce compound curves without any upholstery, for [...]

Produce: Jamie Fobert Architects Womenswear Gallery in Selfridges

You know you’re doing something right when on the opening night of one project the client offers you another. That happened to Jamie Fobert, principal of Jamie Fobert Architects, at the launch party for the Selfridges women’s shoe department. That was the largest such undertaking in Europe and the return per sq ft has surprised [...]

The Boat Project

‘When you design a boat you normally know what materials you are going to be building out of – we obviously didn’t,’ says boat designer Simon Rogers, surprisingly exuberantly as he starts to describe The Boat Project. Part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad – a festival of arts linked to and culminating at the same [...]

Referencing the Past: John McAslan at SOAS

Brutalism remains the most controversial architectural style of the 20th century with the British public. Perhaps no architect brought more attention to it than Denys Lasdun, whose National Theatre masterpiece was famously compared by Prince Charles to a nuclear reactor when it sneaked into the heart of London.When it comes to working with historic buildings, [...]

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 [...]