Blueprint Meets Lomokino: The Movies
In collaboration with Lomography, Blueprint handed four Lomokino movie cameras to a bunch of handpicked creatives and gave them one theme: ‘Inside Out’. These are the results…
Rachel Whiteread at the Whitechapel Gallery
It’s been 110 years in the making for the facade at the Whitechapel Gallery in London to be completed. Finally, with the help of British artist Rachel Whiteread, the Gallery has decorated the recessed plaque between the two terracotta towers on Whitechapel High Street with golden leaves cast in bronze. The original Charles Harrison Townsend [...]
HEL/LO 2 – Let’s Talk About Games – 6 July
To coincide with the London Festival of Architecture, the Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce the second event in a series of four design discussions titled HEL/LO – Let’s Talk About Games.
New Designers – Discounted Ticket Offer
New Designers, an annual showcase of up-and-coming creative talent, returns to the Business Design Centre in Islington, north London next week, and the organisers are kindly offering readers of Blueprint a 25 per cent discount on tickets.
The show is in two parts with part one taking place between 27 and 30 [...]
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 [...]
Books: Zaha Hadid and Alberto Kalach, Inspiration and Process
Designed in Moleskine’s iconic style that has long been appreciated for it’s pure material beauty, a new architecture series, Inspiration and Process, features sketches by four renowned architects and practices: Bolles+Wilson, Giancarlo De Carlo, Zaha Hadid and Alberto Kalach. Covered in light grey cardboard tied with Moleskin’s signature elastic strap, the books feature each architect’s [...]
Herzog & de Meuron Relax in London
Image: Cate St. Hill
Here is a picture of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron chilling on their champagne-bottle-stop cork stools beneath their lily-pad disk of water.
Next month, Blueprint’s 2012 Olympcs issue will be spearheaded by Herzog and de Meuron’s Serpentine Pavilion with artist, friend and collaborator on the Beijing Olympics Bird’s Nest [...]
Win Tickets: Machines for Living
‘Reclaim the heavens! Cities in the sky! Concrete solutions!’
Let Slip, a London-based theatre company, present their latest play Machines for Living, satirising the legacy of Britain’s tower blocks. The play focuses on two architects think their design ideologies can change the way we live. But when they move into the tower block they have built, [...]
Review – Eames: The Architect and the Painter
It all began with the moulded plywood chair. Voted by Time Magazine as the greatest design of the 20th Century, and conceived for a competition at MoMA in 1940 with Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames attempted to reinvent the very idea of the chair. They wanted to mass-produce compound curves without any upholstery, for [...]
Produce: Jamie Fobert Architects Womenswear Gallery in Selfridges
You know you’re doing something right when on the opening night of one project the client offers you another. That happened to Jamie Fobert, principal of Jamie Fobert Architects, at the launch party for the Selfridges women’s shoe department. That was the largest such undertaking in Europe and the return per sq ft has surprised [...]
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, [...]
The Boat Project
‘When you design a boat you normally know what materials you are going to be building out of – we obviously didn’t,’ says boat designer Simon Rogers, surprisingly exuberantly as he starts to describe The Boat Project. Part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad – a festival of arts linked to and culminating at the same [...]
Referencing the Past: John McAslan at SOAS
Brutalism remains the most controversial architectural style of the 20th century with the British public. Perhaps no architect brought more attention to it than Denys Lasdun, whose National Theatre masterpiece was famously compared by Prince Charles to a nuclear reactor when it sneaked into the heart of London.When it comes to working with historic buildings, [...]
The Jerwood Gallery, Hastings
Hastings is eclectic. Topographically and architecturally it is an absurd and bewildering amalgamation of faded seaside grandeur, tired boatyards, crumbling , eccentric modes of transport and, what now seems to be the norm in British seaside towns, the carcass of a burned-out pier. This month sees the opening of the new Jerwood Gallery, by architecture [...]
Event: HEL/LO – Let’s Talk – 24 May
Thursday 24 May, 6–9 pm
The Gopher Hole
350–354 Old Street,
London, EC1V 9NQ
Blueprint and The Finnish Institute in London is delighted to announce a series of four events called HEL/LO – Let’s Talk. They will bring together architecture and design professionals from London and Helsinki for a lively discussion and exchange of ideas throughout the year. The [...]
The Shard
This Month, Blueprint focuses on the Shard. Architect Renzo Piano has transformed the London skyline with 306m, 87-storey tower that sets a precedent for high-rise in the capital. Herbert Wright talks to the architect and tells the story of this towering achievement that has already divided opinion across the city.
To accompany the issue, architectural photographer [...]
In Numbers at the ICA
Self-publishing has never been more accessible than it is today thanks to the internet and the availability of digital printing. So, in many ways, In Numbers is a timely exhibition and book as it charts the growth of publications produced by artists since the Fifties to the present day.
From the rise of the small press [...]
Jólan van der Wiel’s Gravity Stools
Amsterdam-based designer Jólan van der Wiel delights in calling his products ‘freakish and organic’ and he’s not wrong. They also beg the question, ‘How on earth did you do that?’ The answer, magnetism.
Essentially, for his stools, van der Wiel mixes a large amount of iron filings – around 6kg – with some liquid plastic, then [...]
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 [...]
Review: David Shrigley at the Hayward Gallery
‘I wanted to call it “Fancy rooms filled with crap”,’ muses David Shrigley at the opening of his latest exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, ‘but they said no.’ However, the show’s eventual title, Brain Activity, is rather apt, as it opens a window on to the artist’s methods of working.
Principally known for his drawings, Shrigley [...]
