Category: reviews

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

Architecture in Archives: The Collection of the Akademie der Künste (2016) – Review

Architecture in Archives: The Collection of the Akademie der Künste (2016) – Review

Irina Davidovici

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

Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review

Markus Lähteenmäki

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

Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at the Soane Museum – Review

Simon Henley

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

Johan Celsing Buildings Texts (2021) – Review

Nina Lundvall

‘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