New Generation

Despite good intentions, few products are successful in combining design, aesthetics and ergonomics in a way that is also friendly to users. The new Generation office chair, just launched in the UK by American furniture company Knoll, can be counted as a rare exception.
Created by New Zealand-based practice Formway Design for Knoll, Generation was four [...]

The Expert View

In addition to our own choices, Blueprint asked three experts in the fields of Technology, Architecture and Urbanism and Product/Furniture design to look ahead and make recommendations for the people they think will make a difference in 2010.

Young Photographers’ Opening Shots

For the January 2010 issue of Blueprint, our Opening Shot was provided by Chris Greenaway, a third year photography student at Winchester School of Art. Blueprint’s art director Patrick Myles set a brief asking the students to capture strange, new or critical aspects of the built environment. Presented here are the series of photographs taken by the students with an explanation of their shot.

Paper City workshops: Arnold Schwarzman, Mobile Studio and Laurie Chetwood

There will be two drawing workshops at the Royal Academy of Arts this Sunday to accompany Blueprint’s Paper City exhibition. The workshops, which take place during The Big Draw 2009, are free and open to all ages.
The exhibition in The Architecture Space, Paper City: Urban Utopias, showcases a selection of extraordinary drawings, collages and photomontages that have [...]

Forty years of David Mellor Design

Forty years to the day it opened on 7 October 1969 the David Mellor Store on London’s Sloane Square held a celebration of the achievements of the company and launched a book that documents the work of the British designer.

Discovering Women in Polish Design

A new book examining the important role of women in Polish design, was published recently by Blueprint’s Product Editor Gian Luca Amadei. Discovering Women in Polish Design was launched on 23 September at the Young Creative Poland exhibition as part of London Design Festival. The launch was accompanied by a panel discussion ‘Discovering Polish Design’ chaired by [...]

Paper City exhibition to travel to Cambridge

Blueprint and the RA’s exhibition Paper City: Urban Utopias will travel to Cambridge, and will be on show at the School of Architecture for a week from 26 November. The exhibition coincides with a conference Minimum…or Maximum Cities for which Blueprint is media partner.

Competition: win a day in a chauffeur-driven Cube!

Competition: Tour the London Design Festival with Nissan Design Europe and Sebastian Conran.
As part of the London Design Festival, Nissan Design Europe is opening its doors for a rare peak into its European design HQ to celebrate the diversity of London’s creative industries.
 
From Wednesday 23rd to Friday 25th September, Nissan will host a three day [...]

Architecture and Film: Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

The dialogue between two generations and two art forms, architecture and film, examined in this vast and fascinating exhibition, informs an ongoing debate that continues to divide opinion within Israel. It emerges from the work of Munio Weinraub and his son Amos Gitai. Weinraub, who emigrated from Silesia, Germany in 1934, to the northern worker [...]

Blueprint at the London Design Festival

DESIGN IS SIMPLY COMPLEX
The Blueprint editorial office and design studio will be part of an exhibition at the Wapping Project in east London. For the show, Design Is Simply Complex, Blueprint will be creating its November issue in public. There will also be a chance to read archive copies, buy the magazine and peek at [...]

Jacque Tati’s Troubled Playtime

Last month I wrote an article about the new attention being given to Jacques Tati in Paris, and the filmmaker’s complex relationship with architecture. Tati’s dedication to depicting this subject meant that the production of his classic, Playtime, involved a prolonged and troubled construction process.
The full story of the film began when Tati was visiting [...]

Javier Mariscal’s Drawing Life and Paper City

Barcelona-based designer Javier Mariscal thinks and draws fast: for his first major show in the UK at the London Design Museum, Drawing Life, 320 drawings are hanging in the entrance. The installation (pictured above) is intended to be like a ‘shower of images’: having digested extraneous mental imagery visitors are then free to look at [...]

What’s on this week: 27-31th July

6 July-14 October
One & Other
Trafalgar Square, WC2
One & Other is artist Antony Gormley’s well-trumpeted, non-stop, public participatory project that will place a different member of the masses on Trafalgar Square’s otherwise empty fourth plinth every hour for 100 days.  The first human installation has scrambled on to the plinth on 6 July and participants are [...]

What’s on this week: 23-30th July

19th July- 5th October
In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976
MOMA, New York
This exhibition of 120 works includes drawings, installations, films, posters, and artists’ books from artists with different nationalities who either travelled to or stayed in Amsterdam during the 1960’s and 1970’s, creating a transatlantic trade in influences. Among artists who engaged [...]

Stark Reality by Robert Marsden

Stark Reality is an installation, by Robert Marsden, that features eight large geometrical sculptures which are constructed by laser-cut mild steel sheets and bolted onto mdf panels. Although the exhibition is seemingly an aesthetic exploration of steel, the artist believed that the sculptures become more than just a material manifestation once they began defining spaces. [...]

What’s On This Week

9 July – 16 August
Aurélien Froment
Gasworks, SE11
Along with a video conversation with filmmaker Werner Herzog, who Fitzcarraldo has informed some of artist Aurélien Froment’s recent work, the exhibition will show examples of Froment’s photography, sculpture and print. Although his work has been seen at Tate Britain and is available through store in London, this is [...]

In The Press: Can Gormley Succeed Where Singalongs Failed?

There was obviously something in the air when decided to do a special issue of Blueprint about the limits of public space. London’s summer heatwave, the activities of the Manifesto Club, and the opening of The High Line in New York have all contributed to rash of attempts to work out what public space [...]

Press release: Stop the hyper-regulation of public space

 
Blueprint answers Mayor Johnson’s call for ideas for London’ great spaces: Remove the rules and regulations!

In a series of experiments around London’s squares and piazzas, undercover Blueprint researchers have performed a series of activities to test the limits of public space. The researchers undertook a host of different activities in various guises and logged the responses [...]

Vitra/CIRECA Workshop Diary: Eclecticism and Inspiration

One of the unusual assets of the Vitra Design Museum is its ever expanding collection of buildings on site: contributions from Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Alvaro Siza, and Jean Prouvé make something like an architectural park. The Boisbuchet site, which is owned and run by the Museum’s director Alexander von [...]

Gabriele Bramante on the Birdy coffee machine

Officially this coffee machine is called Essenza, but it is deliberately designed to look like a character and so has affectionately come to be known as the Birdy because of its broad shoulders, its oversized beak and its large pouch collecting, not nuts, but disused coffee capsules.
Already a design icon, I’m convinced that the Birdy – which was [...]