Utopian Longings
Paul Goldberger is The New Yorker’s architecture critic and an academic. He’s a New Jersey boy who joined the New York Times in the early 1970s and after a decade of writing about architecture picked up a Pulitzer Prize. For several years he has harboured a desire to write a book for the general public [...]
Museum of Innocence
When I heard that the novel The Museum of Innocence had spawned a real museum, opening in Istanbul later this year to coincide with the city’s Capital of Culture celebrations, I was disappointed. I pictured an intellectual theme park to which fans of Orhan Pamuk’s novels, now translated into more than 50 languages, would make [...]
OMA Remakes Architecture
It could be argued that the recent obsession with the term ‘iconic architecture’ has simplified our understanding of what makes good design. We take it for granted that serious or celebrated architects create architecture of quality even though the sources of their creativity remain elusive and hidden. In some schools of architecture the author’s credentials [...]
Whiteness, Emptiness, Simplicity
In the prologue to his book, White, Kenya Hara writes: ‘it is my hope that, by the time you have finished reading this book, “white” will look differently to you.’ It certainly does that, perhaps more so for the English speaking readers, as Hara also notes.
This simple essay is filled with reflections on Japanese history [...]
What is British design?
The futile search for a contemporary ‘British’ national design identity provided a quaint theme for this year’s London Design Festival (LDF). This was accompanied by some soul searching in the broadsheets on what exactly constitutes British design and whether it has lost its mojo.
Supersonic Design
Marc Newson is considered by many to be the leading light of contemporary design today. He describes his work as instinctive, creating what he believes to be a ‘representation of fantastical objects’. His work flows from design concepts with artistic connotations to designs that are functional and mass-produced.
One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square
Author Marshall Berman has spent much of his life in or around Times Square. His mother would encourage the family to take a ‘bath of light’ in the Square, and, inspired by James Dean, it was there that he would practice the art of ‘hanging out’. Filled with personal histories, the book leads the [...]
Bunker by Robert Kusmirowski
As part of Polska! Year in the UK, Robert Kusmirowski has undertaken his first UK show, entitled Bunker. The Lodz-born artist has created an installation based upon a World War Two-era bunker that transforms the Barbican’s Curve gallery into a new territory. The bunker is littered with artefacts and objects that lie rusted, distorted and [...]
Pop Art and Publishing by Eduardo Paolozzi
As publishing goes through a prolonged bout of self-doubt, this exhibition of Eduardo Paolozzi’s work for the literary magazine Ambit is a timely reminder of what it can be. It’s not just news journalists in war zones who write the first page of history, but poets, editors and illustrators of avant-garde poetry publications such as Ambit.
Exhibition: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
David Lynch’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, Dune, has its 25th anniversary this year. Yet Lynch’s film, from which the director removed his own name, and that opened to a critical mauling and low box-office receipts, was only the final effort in a decade-long series of attempts to make a screen [...]
Charles Ledray’s Mens Suits
For three years, American artist Charles LeDray has been meticulously crafting Mens Suits, his first exhibition in the UK, commissioned by Artangel. Sitting in a disused fire station, three ‘scenes’ suggest the interiors of charity shops. Without walls and with their own miniature floor tiles, the little replicas sit directly on the floor. Each has [...]
Book Review: Artists’ Studios by MJ Long
M J Long’s book is a wonderful insight into the repackaging of everyday households into spaces that are compact, but large enough for an artist’s studio. The book, which is appropriately bound in uncoated, grey millboard, features 13 studios that Long has designed for artists – who were mostly friends of her and her late [...]
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 [...]
Radical Nature and Richard long
Let ecology inspire artists, let biology be the blueprint for architects. If Radical Nature had a manifesto, that might be it. The Barbican’s show charts the vogue for eco-design with works dating back to 1969, before global warming was even on the international agenda. Two years earlier in 1967, English artist Richard Long had made [...]
Book Review: Anna Minton’s Ground Control
How and why has so much anti-social space been created in Britain? Anna Minton has written an important book on the topic. Ground Control doesn’t shriek, it isn’t utopian and it certainly isn’t environmental determinism. But it is highly readable and thoroughly researched and it should be required reading for architects and planners. Minton manages [...]
Reliving Chandigarh: The Furniture of Le Corbusier and Jeanerret
The Furniture of Chandigarh in a cavernous underground space at P3, presents a series of 1950s furniture that were part of the buildings Le Corbusier with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, were responsible for designing. After Indian independence in 1947 and the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan, there was a need for a new administrative [...]
Varnishing Day at the RA Summer Show
Adrian Friend of Friend and Company set off with duster and a bottle of Windolene to attend a quaint event known as Varnishing Day, exclusively for exhibitors to the Royal Academy’s Summer Show. Here he describes the experience and suggests some highlights of the Architecture Room.
The opportunity to attend Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy Summer [...]
Book Review: Beyond Architecture
There’s a compulsive, obsessiveness about the work in this book that for me makes it one of the most enjoyable things I’ve seen in a long time. Architecture itself is an obsessive process, but it requires the kind of level-headedness that is definitely not shared by the artists’ whose work features in Beyond Architecture. These artists [...]
Book Review: Las Vegas Studio
In this era of reissues, out-takes, deluxe editions and unpluggeds comes a third trophy from a long distant but monumentally important academic field trip to Las Vegas in 1968. Not many tutors can say that about their excursions. The Venturis can. First there was the original, seminal, beautiful, Learning From Las Vegas, an art [...]
Gerhard Richter Portraits
An exhibition of Gerhard Richter Portraits at London’s National Portrait Gallery turns out to be heretical in terms of the assumption that a portrait can tell you anything about interior life.
Richter is one of the most prolific and diverse contemporary artists, and remarkably this is the first show there has ever been of his portraits. It’s not [...]
