King’s Cross Reborn

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 [...]

October 25th, 2011 by Owen Pritchard 

Walking Men

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 [...]

May 12th, 2011 by Esme Fieldhouse 

Welcome to the Spontaneous City

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 [...]

March 29th, 2011 by Esme Fieldhouse 

Noir Urbanisms

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 [...]

February 11th, 2011 by Esme Fieldhouse 

Made in Taiwan

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 [...]

December 15th, 2010 by AlexWarnock-Smith 

Reading the Situationist City

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 [...]

November 17th, 2010 by Gwen Webber 

Architecture of Almost Nothing

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 [...]

November 4th, 2010 by Adrian Friend 

A Model Settlement

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 [...]

October 18th, 2010 by Peter Kelly 

What is to be done?

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 [...]

September 29th, 2010 by Herbert Wright 

Best Student Projects in Britain

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 [...]

August 27th, 2010 by Editor 

Venice: The Car-Free City?

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, [...]

August 26th, 2010 by Peter Kelly 

Tel Aviv: Signs of a Normal City

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 [...]

August 24th, 2010 by Rob wilson 

Ghostvillage

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 [...]

January 21st, 2010 by Editor 

The Hammer and Sickle Canteen

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, [...]

January 12th, 2010 by Clementine Cecil 

Urban Utopias

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 [...]

December 3rd, 2009 by Editor 

Book Review: Anna Minton’s Ground Control

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 [...]

August 4th, 2009 by Eeva Berglund 

In The Press: Can Gormley Succeed Where Singalongs Failed?

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 [...]

July 3rd, 2009 by Peter Kelly 

Rome: Politics and Architecture

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 [...]

May 15th, 2009 by Peter Kelly 

London Yields: Urban Agriculture

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 [...]

April 15th, 2009 by Gian Luca Amadei 

The Subject: Grand Plans for Paris

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 [...]

March 30th, 2009 by Peter Kelly 
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