Category: reviews

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

Charles 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