Category: reviews
Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review
8 March 2024
Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review8 March 2024
Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan architect who died in 2003 at 83 years old in his native Columbo, has been justly celebrated for the skill with which he integrated modern architectural forms and materials into the landscapes and built environment of Sri Lanka and Bali. Although he was often labelled… Read More
Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (2022) — Review
24 February 2024
Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (2022) — Review24 February 2024
In Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers Sociologist David Turnbull reflects on the way technologies of drawing shape thought and action.[1] Cathedrals got built prior to international agreement on common units of measure, often without agreed plans, and without those people we now call architects. What scope for improvisation did individual masons… Read More
Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review
8 February 2024
Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review8 February 2024
In 1977, two years into the city’s fiscal crisis, I moved to New York City—a young architecture student, ready to take in everything the metropolis had to offer. What I found was a city scarred by garbage strikes, the blackout, and a serial killer calling himself the Son of Sam.… Read More
The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review
26 January 2024
The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review26 January 2024
There is an ongoing debate within the field of theology and the arts concerning to what degree ‘theology’ must guide the discussion. Those on one side of the divide argue that unless the terms are clearly staked out within traditional discourses and literature in theology, we do not know what… Read More
The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review
8 December 2023
The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review8 December 2023
The Polyhedrists is described as ‘a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern period’.[1] Despite it being a relatively short book, it offers a complex and confronting view of polyhedra’s history; polyhedra being three-dimensional convex shapes with flat polygonal faces and straight edges. Its author, Noam… Read More
The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review
13 November 2023
The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review13 November 2023
Dwelling is on the political and architectural agenda of every European country in response to the rise of private housing development investment which has dominated the free market in the last decades, transforming cities and creating a new form of housing crisis. The Renewal of Dwelling. European Housing Construction 1945-75… Read More
Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review
30 October 2023
Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review30 October 2023
Architectural history is a delicate matter when it comes to exhibitions: especially, if the subject is a creator like Raphael (1487-1520) whose work as a designer, despite its relevance, survives in a dramatically fragmentary state. Thus, it can only be reconstructed by means of analytical philology, mostly using secondary sources,… Read More
Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review
17 October 2023
Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review17 October 2023
Now remembered almost only for The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones, architect, designer, writer, publisher was regarded in his lifetime as one of the greats of British architectural and design culture, up with Pugin and Ruskin. Yet of his prolific output of some 60 buildings and interior schemes, nine… Read More
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review
29 September 2023
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review29 September 2023
Paul Goesch was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital and, in 1940, murdered by the Nazis. Looking at these intense, yet often playful and exuberant drawings, it is impossible to forget the stark facts of his life. Which is unfortunate, because an exclusive attention to his personal history imposes a… Read More
Designs on Democracy (2022) – Review
5 September 2023
Designs on Democracy (2022) – Review5 September 2023
‘This is not a book in which material has been selected on the basis of taste; quite the contrary. These are not buildings or personalities with which it has been easy to empathise, and I hope that this book is not read as a defence or an apology.’ With these words the… Read More
Thinking Through Twentieth-Century Architecture (2023) – Review
17 August 2023
Thinking Through Twentieth-Century Architecture (2023) – Review17 August 2023
Philosophy has long played an influential part in architectural practice and discourse. In the last twenty years, several new publications have started to trace the histories of this phenomenon. Some, like Branko Mitrović’s Philosophy for Architects (2011), lay out introductory surveys of major figures, works, and ideas at the overlap… Read More
Poetry and Architecture (2023) — Review
11 August 2023
Poetry and Architecture (2023) — Review11 August 2023
The concluding section of Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics considers ‘the general types of art’ that constitute the self-unfolding of ‘the Ideal, as the true Idea of beauty’, and ranks them in ascending order: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Poetry (dependent upon sensuous manifestation, so not yet philosophy) is made… Read More
Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review
24 July 2023
Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review24 July 2023
Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect is a welcome and necessary publication. Its overview of the ideas and career of Denise Scott Brown establishes the rich foundations of her work in education, urban planning, and architecture, as informed by her attentions to the city as it… Read More
Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review
23 June 2023
Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review23 June 2023
Have you ever considered where your architecture comes from? That is, where the materials that form your home are from and have been produced. Many would be hard-pressed to give an answer to this question. With our connections to materials severed and very little known about the soils and lands… Read More
Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023) – Review
15 June 2023
Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023) – Review15 June 2023
Throughout this book, Matthew Wells sets his face against seeing architectural models as objects in themselves. His preoccupation is with their many uses and, therefore, meanings, which gives Modelling the Metropolis an originality but also an academic flavour which will appeal to some more than others. Though not a book… Read More
Architects at Play (2023) – Review
15 May 2023
Architects at Play (2023) – Review15 May 2023
What is the reason for playing if not to weave relationships with the world? How can creative postures emerge from playing? Originating at the CIVA in Brussels, 2020 and then on show at the Garagem Sul in Lisbon, 2021, the exhibition ‘Architects at Play’, will spend the spring of 2023… Read More
Futures of the Architectural Exhibition (2023) – Review
5 May 2023
Futures of the Architectural Exhibition (2023) – Review5 May 2023
In recent decades, architectural exhibitions have emerged as a principal site for advancing architectural discourse within the design professions and as a primary stage for drawing interest in public audiences to architecture. Many architectural exhibitions have proven the medium an intellectual leaven for new generations of discursive content and styles,… Read More
Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review
14 April 2023
Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review14 April 2023
Flipping through the book for the first time, I discover its contents with a feeling of true ignorance and great excitement. The drawings are both very familiar and yet totally foreign. I am plunged into an intense atmospheric world of fantastical stories, cosmic adventures, archaeological excavations, and biological investigations in… Read More
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review
12 April 2023
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review12 April 2023
Much of the research for this book was consolidated for Anna Bokov’s PhD at Yale, but it is clear that she had been exploring the issues throughout her career, from the Moscow Architectural Institute to Syracuse University to Harvard, before Yale. The acknowledgments include many well-known luminaries in the USA,… Read More
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review
10 April 2023
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 10 April 2023
Climbing the majestic double staircase of the Palau de la Virreina, a building that hovers somewhere between the Baroque and the Rococo, one arrives at a small but intense exhibition on show at [La Virreina] Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona. Curated by María García Ruiz and Moisés Puente, it presents… Read More
Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review
20 March 2023
Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review20 March 2023
This provocative book raises many questions about books themselves, including through the way in which it is published. As the first in a gta Verlag series that works the grain of open access by presenting a combined digital and analogue publication simultaneously, it is an interesting choice. The printed book,… Read More
Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review
6 March 2023
Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review6 March 2023
‘Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future’ is an exhibition which, despite being in the small window gallery of the Building Centre in London, offers the visitor a chance to rethink the sources and uses of contemporary construction materials. Developed by curators Summer Islam, George Massoud, and Paloma Gormley of research-based architectural studio… Read More
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review
21 February 2023
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review21 February 2023
Collected Works opens with a lecture that Adam Caruso and Peter St John gave at the Architecture Foundation in London, in 1998. The text sets the tone of the publication. As a reader, one is invited to enter the universe of two architects who are searching for their position in the… Read More
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration
23 January 2025
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration23 January 2025
– James Payne
On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events,… Read More
urban form projection (axonometric isometric) housing