Category: reviews
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
Architecture in Archives: The Collection of the Akademie der Künste (2016) – Review
10 February 2023
Architecture in Archives: The Collection of the Akademie der Künste (2016) – Review10 February 2023
Archives, particularly architecture archives, are having a moment. Writers of postcolonial histories increasingly wrangle with their neatly preserved and selected records. Predominantly, documentary evidence under archival care formed the basis for official histories – histories that are by now largely exhausted, if not downright discredited. As traditional sites of hegemonic… Read More
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review
30 January 2023
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review30 January 2023
This carefully curated and beautifully displayed exhibition brings together 150 drawings with numerous publications and films to display a wave of rebellion and research by architects across the European continent, with a focus on the east, over three decades. The abundance of visionary thinking that followed the boom of post-war… Read More
Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at the Soane Museum – Review
25 January 2023
Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at the Soane Museum – Review25 January 2023
Between 19th October 2022 and 8th of January 2023, the calm galleries and vitrines at no.12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were host to an exhibition called Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at the Soane Museum. Organised around a dramatic comparison between the thoughts and work of two architects –… Read More
Johan Celsing Buildings Texts (2021) – Review
6 December 2022
Johan Celsing Buildings Texts (2021) – Review6 December 2022
‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the handing on of the fire’ Gustav Mahler quoted in Johan Celsing Buildings Texts The work of Johan Celsing represents the continuation of a tradition of significant twentieth century Swedish architects into the present. While the influence of Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz… Read More
Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act, Form – Review
2 December 2022
Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act, Form – Review2 December 2022
Alberto Cruz (1917–2013) was an architect and theorist who devoted most of his professional life to education. In 1952, he played an important role in revitalising the School of Architecture at the Universidad Catolica de Valparíso, Chile, founding the Instituto de Arquitectura de Valparaíso with eight of his colleagues, including… Read More
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models (2021) – Review
24 November 2022
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models (2021) – Review24 November 2022
A book like The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models cannot be read with speed. Each chapter is finite, and although linked by others into sections, each forms a stand-alone reading event. It also cannot be seen as a book about architectural drawing. The photographic reproduction is poor, often… Read More
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review
10 November 2022
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review10 November 2022
“The history of modern architecture is the history of its exhibitions,” states the introduction of the anthology ‘Exhibiting Architecture’, [1] and it is hard to deny the central role of exhibitions in the writing of the canonic and the public history of architecture. Yet the exclusionary nature of the history… Read More
Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places (2022) – review
31 October 2022
Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places (2022) – review31 October 2022
– Eric Parry and Robin Webster
Reviews by Robin Webster and Eric Parry, and notes from Celia Scott. The opening of the exhibition and symposium about the architect Robert (Bob) Maxwell and the sculptor Celia Scott was held in the elegant home of the Irish Architectural Archive, at 45 Merrion Square in Dublin. The focus of… Read More
Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review
20 October 2022
Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review20 October 2022
The basement exhibition space at F’AR Lausanne is dominated by a forest of delicate metal and glass tilting tables within which drawings have been placed. When rotated from the horizontal, they give the large, artificially lit room the feeling of a drawing studio at the end of the day; the… Read More