Olympics 2012: What happens next?
Olympic park 2014
When London dignitaries and sportspeople mounted the podium in Singapore in July 2005 to make their final presentation to
the International Olympic Committee, it looked unlikely that we’d be celebrating London 2012 – the city’s bid was considered to be a distant second or third behind Paris and Madrid.
London’s surprising win that morning was [...]
John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library
John Madin, Birmingham’s most famous 20th-century architect, would surely have loved Architex. It was a construction set for children, of all ages, made in England in the Sixties. I had one. Yellow plastic I-beams could be clipped together with clear plastic joints to create the frames of sub-Miesian or sub-SOM-style office blocks. With plasticised cardboard [...]
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, [...]
Josep Lluis Mateo’s Filmoteca de Catalunya
‘It was clear to me that the contemporary architecture in the area was unsuccessful. It ruined it. The buildings have a certain mass and density that makes them seem fragile and uninteresting in the wider context. All these appear totally lost and boring.’ Architect Josep Lluis Mateo, sat in his office in a northern suburb [...]
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 [...]
Science Practical
As a practice that prides itself on impacting on, but also extending beyond, architecture, the Dutch practice UNStudio has long had a resolute approach to the architectural discipline that stressed the importance of research and testing. What started as an art historian-architect collaboration between Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos 24 years ago has eloquently morphed into [...]
Failing to Succeed
Aside from hardline left-wingers, no one would probably claim wholeheartedly that the failure of the big banks and massive bailouts in 2008 that led to rising unemployment, among other things, was a good thing. Can failure ever be for the good? It’s difficult to come to a conclusion because nobody likes to talk about their failures. The public [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
