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 [...]
The Limiting Vision of Sustainability
The tenor of the conversation in the common rooms and bars around the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University must be pretty bleak, never mind in its lecture halls and laboratories. ‘The last thing I thought I would hear today was technological optimism,’ said Peter Guthrie at a conference last week, entitled Minimum or Maximum Cities, organised by [...]
One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square
Author Marshall Berman has spent much of his life in or around Times Square. His mother would encourage the family to take a ‘bath of light’ in the Square, and, inspired by James Dean, it was there that he would practice the art of ‘hanging out’. Filled with personal histories, the book leads the [...]
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 [...]
Reject the Dubai Clichés
It is time to reassess the extreme clichés about Dubai. To many, it is a fabulous place, fast-forwarding into the future with stunning, drop-dead architecture and stupefying engineering driven by a can-do mentality that casually obliterates Guinness records. Alternatively, it is the quintessential dystopia sprung from unfettered development, environmentally and socially unsustainable, and an architectural [...]
Fresh from the Battle of Ideas
Architects and critics fall back on describing architecture when the debate gets difficult. This was one of the conclusions from The Age of the Metropolis discussion at The Battle of Ideas, which Blueprint had the honour to be media partner of. The discussion as a whole was a neccesary riposte to the The Age of [...]
