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 [...]
Review: UCL Urban Lab and Passengerfilms present Estates
The clichéd interpretation of estates went under the microscope when a series of strikingly poignant portraits of the former residents of the Haggerston Estate were brandished in the place of the conspicuous and demoralising orange boards, initially erected by the council to dissuade unwanted squatters. A documentary film, Estate, captures a moment of imminent transition, [...]
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 [...]
Book: Weather Architecture
Weather Architecture acknowledges the creative stimulus of inclement weather in the emblematic Rousham Garden by architect William Kent (1685-1748), whereby Jonathan Hill portrays the sense of the picturesque and rural idyll that pervades it.
Here the English empirical garden transcended the ancien régime by mixing allegory from ancient Rome with gothic and Arcadian symbols referring to [...]
Book: The Architectural and Cultural Guide Pyongyang
German architect and publisher Philipp Meuser describes Pyongyang, the North Korean psycho regime’s capital, as ‘arguably the world’s best-preserved open-air museum of socialist architecture’. This publication offers a solid armchair trip through it. Volume 1 has photographs and descriptions furnished by the official Pyongyang Foreign Publishing House, without critical comment, but Volume 2 includes critical [...]
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 [...]
Film: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth directed by Chad Friedrichs
The story of Pruitt-Igoe, the Fifties’ public housing project that Charles Jencks famously used to pinpoint the exact time of modernism’s death, is not a simple tale of blighted aesthetic ideals. Pruitt-Igoe is commonly used to illustrate modernism’s misgivings about public space and private dwellings, which are also attributed to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Now documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [...]
Review: Nano House
‘Small’ can instinctively imply an unappealing, claustrophobic space. However, in Nano House: Innovations for small dwellings, Phyllis Richardson presents a collection of 43 ‘small’ dwellings and examines the feasibility of mini living spaces.
Where space is limited and energy use is a global concern, ‘nano’ houses, with versatility and appreciation for materials in their design, could [...]
Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design
On a page well in to this generously proportioned and beautifully designed book, Saul Bass, a Life in Film and Design, is a photograph of Bass, taken in 1980, the protean designer sitting on an elegant Thonet bentwood chair, the visual fruits of his creative life mounted on a wall behind him: logos, pack designs, [...]
OMA/Progress
One have might forecast that an exhibition surrounding OMA, the world’s most self-critical architecture practice, was never going to just another homogeneous exhibition. Indeed, at the moment of approaching the Barbican’s illusive west entrance – originally conceived as the entrance to the art gallery but never used – there is a sense that any other [...]
Forgotten Spaces
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Reintroduction of Atlantic Salmons, Urban Physic Garden, underground climbing facilities and above all low rent studios in church spires. Everything could happen in London if you look at the proposals gathered under Somerset House’s roof.
RIBA received 138 responses to their open competition aiming to find the most creative designs that would reclaim forgotten parts of [...]
Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby: Ascent
It’s been a vintage year for British design duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby; in the spring their first monograph was published by Rizzoli, which was followed a couple of months later by the unveiling of the 2012 Olympic torch, and now a solo exhibition at London art gallery Haunch of Venison.
Titled Ascent, the show [...]
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 [...]
The Time Machine
Edgar Martins’ photography takes us to strange locations and makes them stranger still. His latest project, The Time Machine, is the result of a ‘topographical survey’ of 20 hydro-electric power stations in Portugal. They penetrate a deserted industrial world, as if frozen in time and chanced upon by a future explorer.
In Martins’ photographs, the built [...]
Frankfurt Motor Show
Audi chose the massive Frankfurt Motor Show to debut its urban concept car. The vehicle has grown out of its Urban Future Initiative programme looking at cities and mobility issues of the future, with involvement from the likes of Jurgen Mayer H and, from the UK, Alison Brooks Architects.
Preceding the motorshow was the latest of [...]
Review: Marfa Voices
Donald Judd, American artist, art critic, architect and compulsive consumer of space, loved cacti. Everytime he and his family moved apartment, the cactus would move with him. And as his friend Jamie Dearing recalled, while Judd rented a space on 19th Street, New York, Judd was nurturing a sprawling cactus. Then space got tight so [...]
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World
‘Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!’ declares BLAST, the 1914 summer publication by the Vorticist artists. This opening statement is painfully ironic; emerging just as Europe descended into World War I, Vorticism was destined to be short-lived. The Tate’s Manifesto for a Modern World is an intriguing [...]
Review: Hackney Wicked
Between the Olympics and Victoria Park in East London lies an urban island called Hackney Wick, an unassuming place that as a four year resident witnessed some dramatic urban renewal in the last six months. As the adjacent landscape prepares for the greatest show on earth on 27 July, 2012 we welcome the fourth free [...]
