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 [...]
Arctic Perspective
The severe climate of the Arctic poses one of the most demanding challenges for architects, be it in designing more permanent dwellings for the native inhabitants or the more temporary structures for the scientists and researchers who work there. The establishment of Western-style townships in the circumpolar regions by ‘southerners’ (as everyone else in the [...]
Future beauty: 30 years of Japanese fashion
Japanese fashion is always so richly of its time, so fiercely imaginative and original that even if you only wear it once, it’s an investment never to be regretted. After seeing Issey Miyake’s exhibition Making Things at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 1998, I craved a piece of APOC (A Piece Of Cloth) – [...]
Journeys at the CCA
Journeys, the latest exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), is a modern-day matryoshka doll. It is a research project, a show, a book and an ongoing online exhibition. And it is a wonderful process of unravelling.
As the title explains, the exhibition is about the movement of people, ideas, buildings and fruit, and how [...]
Noir Urbanisms
In a comprehensive introduction, Gyan Prakash punches through the walls that have, until now, restricted the debate on urban dystopia and whether it is merely a construct of Western literature and cinema. Noir Urbanisms comprises ten neatly independent essays which, collectively, allow interdisciplinary interaction. Each chapter explores dark representations of the city that have become [...]
Once Upon A Wartime
Once Upon a Wartime brings five 20th-century children’s stories about the experience of war to life in a forthcoming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. The exhibition, designed by Pippa Nissen Studio, uses the books: War Horse; Carrie’s War; The Machine Gunners; The Silver Sword and Little Soldier to provide an insight into the reality [...]
Packing It In
This project, The Crate Series, first planted itself in the consciousness of Studio Makkink & Bey in India. Architect Rianne Makkink witnessed the humble crate defining all measure of everyday environments for inhabitants of the cramped cities, and wondered how this might be tested in her own familiar surroundings. Upon returning to the Netherlands, Makkink, [...]
A Font of Knowledge
Simon Garfield isn’t a designer. Or an architect or a visual artist or a typesetter. What he is, is a journalist and author of many excellent books on esoteric subjects. Oh, I lied about him not being a typersetter – he is, but only on an amateur basis. And that’s the setting-off point for Just [...]
Fashion Lines
Drawing Fashion at the London Design Museum comprises a selection of 150 works by 16 fashion illustrators, created for various designers as advertising material, usually for publication in commercial magazines.
They have been drawn from the extensive collection of Joelle Chariau, founder and owner of a Munich gallery specialising in fashion drawings. The exhibition spans a [...]
Trawling ‘Blairite’ Britain
The architectural state-of-the-nation book has a rich pedigree. Owen Hatherley’s second book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, follows in the tradition of JB Priestly’s English Journey and Ian Nairn’s Outrage. As these writers defined the 1930s and 1950s respectively, so Hatherley takes on the Blairite era, casting a critical eye over [...]
Movement and Behaviour
The Hayward Gallery in London is developing a strong tradition of constructing immersive environments that explore the relationship between art and other creative disciplines. Psycho Buildings in 2008 and the more recent exhibition of Ernesto Neto with The New Décor in particular examined art’s acquaintance with architecture. The new show, Move: Choreographing You, tells the [...]
Chasing After Shadows
This exhibition contends that while the conventional camera has constrained the photographer to look into a viewfinder and gaze out at the world, the camera-less photographer has been freed to gaze within. Shadow Catchers brings together five of the most prominent practitioners of camera-less photography: Floris Neüsuss, Pierre Cordier, Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges and [...]
Reading the Situationist City
Founded by theorist and film-maker Guy Debord in 1957, the Situationist International (SI) was a group of European artists and poets, influenced by, and formed in reaction to, avant-garde movements, predominantly the Letterists, Surrealists and Cobra. Its theories married existentialist activism, psychoanalysis, the Marxist approach to commodity culture and the Frankfurt School philosophy with anarchistic [...]
Gardens of Experience
Adam Caruso, of London-based practice Caruso St John, values the past, and in his forthcoming publication, he argues that we should too. His book, titled Gardens of Experience, forms part of the Designers of the Future series supported by the Delft University of Technology and Stylos, which invites practitioners and theoreticians to share their vision [...]
