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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Orphans of Apollo
What would space travel look like if the Russian Mir space station had been bought by rogue entrepreneurs and kept in orbit for private enterprises to use? No doubt it would have accelerated today’s feverish race to develop space tourism and been a catalyst for other commercial enterprises. It would have also affected the Soviet-American [...]
Film Review: Robinson in ruins
Patrick Keiller is a British film-maker, architect, teacher and installation artist. Trained as an architect at the Bartlett, Keiller went on to the Royal College of Arts in 1979, where he started to experiment with film. Since then it has become his medium of choice and with it he scrutinizes the issues surrounding ideas of [...]
