Category: reviews
Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review
24 July 2023
Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review24 July 2023
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
23 June 2023
Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review23 June 2023
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
15 June 2023
Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023) – Review15 June 2023
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
15 May 2023
Architects at Play (2023) – Review15 May 2023
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
5 May 2023
Futures of the Architectural Exhibition (2023) – Review5 May 2023
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
14 April 2023
Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review14 April 2023
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
12 April 2023
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review12 April 2023
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
10 April 2023
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 10 April 2023
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
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