Category: reviews

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

Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act, Form – Review

Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act, Form – Review

Matt Page

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

The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models (2021) – Review

Desley Luscombe

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

The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review

Esra Akcan

“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

Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places (2022) – review

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

Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review

Laura Evans

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