Category: reviews

Protected: Anton Markus Pasing

Protected: Anton Markus Pasing

Peter Wilson

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Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review

Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

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

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (2022) — Review

Liam Ross

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

Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

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

The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review

C.M. Howell

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

The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

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

The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review

Rodrigo Lino Gaspar

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

Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review

Dario Donetti

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

Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review

Adrian Forty

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

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

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

Designs on Democracy (2022) – Review

Ellis Woodman

‘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

Thinking Through Twentieth-Century Architecture (2023) – Review

André Patrão

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

Poetry and Architecture (2023) — Review

Peter Carl

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

Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review

Mark Pimlott

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

Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review

Elke Krasny

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

Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023) – Review

Andrew Saint

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

Architects at Play (2023) – Review

Mathilde de Laage

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

Futures of the Architectural Exhibition (2023) – Review

Paul Mosley

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

Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review

Emilie Appercé

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

Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review

Peter Carl

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 

The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 

Aureli Mora

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

Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review

Helen Thomas

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

Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

‘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

Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review

Sofie De Caigny

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