Category: reviews
Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review
14.04.2023
Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Practice (2022) – Review14.04.2023
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
12.04.2023
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review12.04.2023
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
10.04.2023
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 10.04.2023
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
20.03.2023
Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review20.03.2023
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
06.03.2023
Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review06.03.2023
‘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
21.02.2023
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review21.02.2023
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
10.02.2023
Architecture in Archives: The Collection of the Akademie der Künste (2016) – Review10.02.2023
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
30.01.2023
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review30.01.2023
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
25.01.2023
Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at the Soane Museum – Review25.01.2023
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
06.12.2022
Johan Celsing Buildings Texts (2021) – Review06.12.2022
‘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
02.12.2022
Alberto Cruz: Observation, Act, Form – Review02.12.2022
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
24.11.2022
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models (2021) – Review24.11.2022
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
10.11.2022
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review10.11.2022
“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
31.10.2022
Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless: Ideas, Faces and Places (2022) – review31.10.2022
– 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
20.10.2022
Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review20.10.2022
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
Kay Fisker: Danish Functionalism and Block-based Housing (2022) – Review
29.09.2022
Kay Fisker: Danish Functionalism and Block-based Housing (2022) – Review29.09.2022
This is a useful book. It is also a book that might be thought of as a vehicle or encouragement towards another book, a foundation for future work, either by the editors, or other architects, architectural historians, or even sociologists. It arose from the fascination of two Irish architects, Andrew… Read More
On Bramante (2022) – Review
22.08.2022
On Bramante (2022) – Review22.08.2022
– Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan
Thomas Padmanabhan: We are very happy to have this book, On Bramante, in front of us. It was written by a friend of ours, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, who is a writer, a teacher and also a practising architect and founding partner of baukuh in Milan. For a while, even before encountering… Read More
Time’s Witness. History in the Age of Romanticism (2021) – Review
25.07.2022
Time’s Witness. History in the Age of Romanticism (2021) – Review25.07.2022
Anxious Objects At some point in the annals of Western scholarship it was judged that the past could be restituted not only from textual sources but also from objects, that the material of history was equally important as its written archive. This major shift in historical approach was largely brought… Read More
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review
18.07.2022
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review18.07.2022
The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More
Hexenhaus (2021) – Review
27.06.2022
Hexenhaus (2021) – Review27.06.2022
‘THE FOREST THAT BUILT THE HOUSE’ There are two drawings for me that are significant in understanding the work of the Smithsons. Both are of Upper Lawn [1]. One is a drawing made by Peter Smithson of their Solar Pavilion in elevation, the other by Alison Smithson in plan. The… Read More
Growing up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes (2021) – Review
13.06.2022
Growing up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes (2021) – Review13.06.2022
What do our birthplaces do to us? Should those homes be considered modernist jewels, the pride of their architects and, sometimes, of their patrons, how would that particular experience be imprinted on their children? Growing up Modern is a highly personal book in which the authors, Julia Jamrozik and Coryn… Read More
Walter Segal, Self-Built Architect (2021) – Review
26.05.2022
Walter Segal, Self-Built Architect (2021) – Review26.05.2022
Given that architect Walter Segal was a Jewish immigrant, born in Berlin to Romanian parents, and a bit of a nomad, it seems unlikely that his best-known work would be confined entirely within London’s boroughs. Resident in the UK for perhaps longer than he had intended, it is in some… Read More
CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the Archive (2020) – Review
07.05.2022
CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the Archive (2020) – Review07.05.2022
The Gordon Matta-Clark archive arrived at the CCA in Montreal 20 years ago. Shortly thereafter, it was used as part of an ‘archival exercise’: Out of the Box: Price, Rossi, Stirling + Matta Clark (23 October 2003–6 September 2004). That first ‘Out of the Box’ prefigures the one undertaken for this publication,… Read More
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review
10.10.2022
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review10.10.2022
– Erik Wegerhoff
There is a strange moment in the second room of the exhibition, where all kinds of great works are hung on the walls to admire, organised around a central display of plastic and aluminium furniture: a collage of a car hovering like the golden calf amidst a crazed crowd; a… Read More