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 [...]
Rebecca Salter: Drawn
Hidden by its shop front exterior Beardsmore Gallery in north London is a new collection of works by English artist Rebecca Salter. Consisting mostly of drawings and including some sculptural experiments Salter’s work places emphasis on surfaces and mark making instead of traditional notions of perspective, maintaining that ‘Space is defined and separated by colour [...]
Wim Crouwel – A Graphic Odyssey
The work of Wim Crouwel has had a profound influence on contemporary graphic design. During the post-war Dutch design scene, dominated by an expressive painterly approach, Crouwel was influenced by modernism and the International Typographic Style, or the Swiss Style. The current exhibition at the Design Museum. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey (until 3 July), [...]
Fred Sandback at Whitechapel Gallery
‘I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out,’ reflects Sandback on his neglect of surface and solid forms in favour of minimalist lines. This idea could not be truer of the work recreated within the Victorian architecture of the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery. [...]
Nintendo’s Game Changer
‘Real 3D Graphics. No Glasses Needed’ is the tagline for the much vaunted – well, much advertised – launch of the Nintendo 3DS hand-held games console. Blueprint handed over this piece of cutting-edge technology to Cinemod Studio, a London-based architecture and interactive design company, to offer an insight into the potential of this increasingly prominent [...]
We Made That at Croome Court
In 1751, the outlandish 6th Earl of Coventry commissioned two whippersnappers to remodel his estate at Croome to make it fit for a king (quite literally, playing host to a number of royals through the years). Here, in rural Worcestershire, Robert Adam and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown established their reputations by crafting both impressive interiors and [...]
Media Lab’s 40,000 New Logos
Last year Media Lab, the Boston-based experimental faction of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), celebrated its 25th birthday. The occasion was marked by the launch of its new graphic identity. Following the opening of the Lab’s new home, E14, this February, the new logo also heralded a period of transition for the institution. In the run-up [...]
Walking Men
‘The pedestrian symbol was never intended to be painted,’ says Stephen Wragg, ‘it appeared on the road by mistake’. Over the last seven years, he has been photographing the walking men painted on our paths. The preoccupation began when Wragg was commissioned by Hertfordshire Highways to design a map for the growing number of cycle [...]
Super-Computer-Romantics
In 1989 the former Theatre de La Gaîté Lyrique reopened as Magic Planet, a theme park costing 61 million euros: an act akin to putting Eurodisney inside the Garrick Theatre in London. In 1991, it was closed and became known as ‘The Sad Mute’ to locals.
Last month, the building thundered back into life as a gallery, [...]
Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer
During his long career, Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) designed more than 4,000 cogent, bold and instantly legible symbols and figures. The politically engaged graphic artist and designer portrayed the world in wood and linoleum cuts. It is still possible to discern his influence today in our everyday lives – in information graphics, on our computer screens [...]
The Bouroullec Family Album
The most intriguing exhibition at Maison et Objet this year was a small retrospective, featuring a selection of recent design pieces by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec. As well as celebrating the pair’s work in their homeland, the show was a reminder of the brothers’ intense design activity. It was an opportunity to experience all their recent [...]
Welcome to the Spontaneous City
The Spontaneous City follows an intimidatingly impressive pedigree of Dutch masterplanning. Perhaps because of the need to design longterm solutions for a flood-prone and high-density country, planning seems to run in the blood among architects in the Netherlands. The most prominent figure in recent years is, of course, Rem Koolhaas who set up his Rotterdam-based [...]
Assembling Hackney Wick
‘After Cineroleum, we were shocked to learn we had a voice,’ says Jane Hall of Assemble, ‘now everyone expects a manifesto from us’. The collective of predominantly, but by no means exclusively, architects-in-training was behind last year’s architectural cult success – a temporary cinema in Clerkenwell, in the heart of London, which they designed, built [...]
