King’s Cross Reborn
London is an amorphous organism, spreading and shifting over the landscape, expanding and contracting in waves of development; building up a residual history of material and architectural languages, creating districts of prosperity and pockets of desolation. Architects, planners and developers regularly seize upon parcels of land and even whole districts to insert urban models that [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Made in Taiwan
The label Made in Taiwan no longer means what it used to. Last month in an article in the country’s main English language newspaper, The Taipei Times, a member of the Consumer Protection Commission in Taiwan complained that substandard goods made in mainland China were being passed off as having been made in the small [...]
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 [...]
Architecture of Almost Nothing
In the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, at the Venice Biennale, Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) unveiled its plans to develop the Libyan Sahara for tourism. The project, titled Almost Nothing, showed that Koolhaas has not been commissioned to build a thing: ‘It’s preservation,’ he explains, if one begins to imagine mechanized buildings [...]
A Model Settlement
In 1980, under the leadership of Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Cibic helped launch the Memphis Group. It was the same year that the first Venice Architecture Biennale was staged, featuring the exhibition Strada Novissima, which consisted of 20 facades by architects including Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, Rem Koolhaas and Arata Isozaki. It was a breakthrough year [...]
What is to be done?
‘We’re tired of old junk! Build us a skyscraper!’ They could almost be the words of Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who repudiated ancient Venice in his Futurist appeal from the Piazza San Marco in 1910. In fact, they are sung a century later by three slightly silly young ladies in The Tower: A Songspiel, a film [...]
Best Student Projects in Britain
Welcome to the largest, best overview of architecture and design students work in the UK. This summer, Blueprint commissioned a panel of 16 architects, designers, curators and critics to visit the annual degree shows of 25 top design schools in Britain. More the 60 projects were nominated by the panel for their imaginative takes on [...]
Venice: The Car-Free City?
Jurgen Mayer Architects were last named the winner of the Audi Urban Futures Award. The award is an innovation was set up by the German car manufacturer to encourage discussions around the relationship between mobility and urban planning. Mayer’s winning proposal posited a future where cars are run entirely on electricity taken from a smart-grid, [...]
Tel Aviv: Signs of a Normal City
‘I love this city,’ enthused my taxi driver, ‘it’s like New York: 24 hour.’ And keeping up the banter until Ben Gurion Airport, he presented a good simulcrum of a New York cabbie though the statement itself was a touch hyperbolic, considering the scale and physical make-up of Tel Aviv. Its inner-city population is only [...]
Ghostvillage
In the January issue of Blueprint, we included graffiti artist collective Agents of Change in our list of 25 who will change architecture and design in 2010. For its Ghostvillage project in October 2009, the group created paintings on the walls throughout the abandoned village of Polphail in south-west Scotland. The project was carried out [...]
The Hammer and Sickle Canteen
In spring 2007 I went to Samara, a city some 500 miles south east of Moscow on the Volga River, to look at the Maslennikov factory canteen (1930-1932) by one of the few female architects of the Soviet avant-garde, Yekaterina Maximova. It has a ground plan in the form of a hammer and sickle and, [...]
Urban Utopias
A city of artificial hills, with towers peaking above the clouds in permanent sunshine, is the vision drawn by Anna Boldina, winner of Blueprint and the Royal Academy’s Paper City competition. Boldina, who is an urban design graduate from Moscow, has lived in London for one year and was inspired to draw her idea after seeing [...]
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 [...]
In The Press: Can Gormley Succeed Where Singalongs Failed?
There was obviously something in the air when decided to do a special issue of Blueprint about the limits of public space. London’s summer heatwave, the activities of the Manifesto Club, and the opening of The High Line in New York have all contributed to rash of attempts to work out what public space [...]
Rome: Politics and Architecture
In Rome, politics and architecture are always deeply interwoven. Yet as Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, and other ambitious buildings, reach completion, Peter Kelly finds that the city’s architects have been thrown into deeper uncertainty by a radical change in administration.
Luca Galofaro, the 44-year-old founder of Rome-based architects IAN+ talks with dismay about running a practice in [...]
London Yields: Urban Agriculture
The London Yields exhibition currently on show at The Building Centre in London investigates the unexploited possibilities for urban agriculture in London. Two of the most visionary schemes presented at the London Yields are Farmacy by Samantha Lee and King’s Vine London by Soonil Kim-King, both students from the Architectural Association. Farmacy is a proposal for [...]
The Subject: Grand Plans for Paris
Just as we were finishing work on our latest Italian-themed issue, which includes a special report on the current troubles of architects in Rome, news spread around the world of President Sarkozy’s competition to create a new Grand Plan for Paris. At first, the contrast between the two cities could not appear more marked. The [...]
