Category: reviews

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