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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Comment: New York
New York, New York, so good they made it twice. This time, the city is being reinvented as the Big Green Apple, with ‘liveability’ at its core, writes Greg Clark.
For New York City, the challenge to stay ahead and keep its lead in the world league of cities is not solely about regaining its economic [...]
Flowing Sculpture
The construction of a new building is a brutal and traumatic act for a city. Even the tiniest of architectural moves requires a readjustment in the delicate balances within this complex organism. ‘The question is does Wakefield want a museum: will the body accept its transplant?’ asks David Chipperfield.
The RIBA Gold Medallist acknowledges that architects [...]
Penguin Beach at ZSL
London Zoo opened for scientific study in 1828 and for public view in 1847. It has since become as much an exhibition of architecture as a collection of animals. The grounds were designed by Decimus Burton, the zoo’s architect from 1826 to 1841, and it now holds an impressive assortment of listed buildings by an [...]
Letter From: Belgrade
On 26 May the former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic was arrested and subsequently handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges that include genocide. The arrest closes a chapter in Serbia’s history and brings the country one step closer to joining its neighbour Slovenia as part of the [...]
Profile: Kenneth Grange
Kenneth Grange, is 82, excellent company and ‘up to his eyes’ in design. First, there’s the Design Museum’s retrospective of his five decades in the industry to prepare for, which involves sifting through ‘miles of archives’. Then there are client projects: a chair for Hitch Mylius and Anglepoise’s latest lamp, the TypeC, and continued work [...]
Best of the Student Shows 2011
This year the Blueprint team and a panel of 14 critics travelled to student degree shows across Great Britain and Europe. After viewing hundreds of presentations from a diverse range of disciplines, here we have compiled their findings, bringing you some of this year’s best work from the designers and architects of the future.
Click on [...]
Drawing on experience
Given only the space of a 10m wall in the foyer of the Museum of London, the compact ‘Hand Drawn London’ exhibition delivers a concentrated collection of unique maps that complement its ongoing ‘London Street Photography’ exhibition running concurrently.
Comprising eleven maps by 10 designers, the objective of the exhibition is simple according to the curators: [...]
High Arctic by United Visual Artists
This month sees the opening of a remarkable exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London by United Visual Artists. For the show, High Arctic, the new Sammy Ofer Wing is transformed into an abstract arctic landscape by the designers and offering an immersive experience that celebrates the unique landscape of the Svalbard [...]
Public Works
Lurking in the shadow of the Royal London Hospital, tucked behind a bar garishly painted in tiger stripes, lies the Whitechapel Giftshop: part home, part community art project, part performance space. Its humble shop front, lit with in neon announcing ‘gift’, conceals a project that tests the typology of the home and presents an alternative [...]
Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown
‘What makes me most proud about this project’, says architect Charles Correa, ‘is that it is not a Museum of Modern Art… I’m fed up of these things’. He is talking about the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, a great sculptural complex set in landscaped, waterside surroundings, suggesting a cultural project intended to [...]
Joe Watling & Roswitha Weingrill: In view of…
In the stripped basement of a Knightsbridge house the Austrian Cultural Forum presents its Visual Arts Platform. ‘In View Of…’ is the second exhibition of a juxtaposition project. Curated by Eva Martischnig and Adriana Marques the scheme has a clear concept; two emerging artists; one working in Austria and one in England are asked to [...]
