Category: reviews
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review
18 October 2021
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review18 October 2021
Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More
Christoph Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika (2020): Review
27 September 2021
Christoph Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika (2020): Review27 September 2021
The Opera Village is a complex located thirty kilometres from the capital of Burkina Faso that was initiated by the late German film, theatre, and opera director, author, and action artist, Christoph Schlingensief and envisioned as a site centring African artists and enabling cross-cultural creative exchange. The ever-expanding project combines… Read More
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt
2 September 2021
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt2 September 2021
By Richard Hall
Notations is a collection of pamphlets in a box. Curating the content in this manner has allowed the editors to present the publication as a physical representation of their thesis that the notebook is a device for the cultivation of individual worlds. The plurality is important. The pamphlets are collected… Read More
Piranesi Unbound (2020): Review
19 August 2021
Piranesi Unbound (2020): Review19 August 2021
There is much to admire in this sequel to Heather Hyde Minor’s Piranesi’s Lost Words (Penn State, 2015), which sets out to ‘explore new territory by reimagining his artistic production in terms of his books’. Whereas Lost Words drew attention to Piranesi as an author who combined texts and images… Read More
Besides, History (2018): Book Review
9 August 2021
Besides, History (2018): Book Review9 August 2021
By Stan Allen
It has a lot to do with misinterpretation. There is no real truth in history. Everything you see belongs to the past and you interpret it in your own way. Its related to visiting buildings, but also to an abstraction in how you re-represent architecture, appropriating it in your own… Read More
Luc Deleu & T.O.P. OFFICE: Future Plans, 1970–2020 (2021) – Review
7 July 2021
Luc Deleu & T.O.P. OFFICE: Future Plans, 1970–2020 (2021) – Review7 July 2021
Future Plans is one of those titles with double and ambiguous meanings. Not exactly as twofold as the most famous ‘The Architecture of the City’ but maybe leaving us equally free to choose. Is the term ‘future’ to be considered as an adjective or a subject? Does this book thus… Read More
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt
14 June 2021
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt14 June 2021
By Helen Thomas
Review The compelling question of reality, or rather its representation as realism presented as an aesthetic category, acts as the organising principle of this interesting book. This is an investigation of the relationship between photography, architecture and the problem of realism, as its subtitle explains. Its author, Jesús Vassallo, immediately… Read More
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review
4 May 2021
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review4 May 2021
By Stan Allen
In a series of essays and lectures developed between 1939 and 1943, the philosopher of science Edgar Zilsel identified three distinct sources of knowledge in the Renaissance. In the late-medieval period, writes Zilsel, the traditional learning associated with the universities was still theological and scholastic in character. The texts preserved… Read More
Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt
19 April 2021
Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt19 April 2021
By Adam Caruso
Review On the occasion of the publication of this book, and the associated exhibition, which was a part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale of 2019, Sébastien Marot gave a talk that positioned his work about the Country’s Side in relation to Rem Koolhaas’s almost contemporaneous Guggenheim exhibition, Countryside. Marot was… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
By Helen Thomas
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt
24 February 2021
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt24 February 2021
Review Three times a week a package arrives in Somerset with another Practice Monograph, and the generous proposal that we might want to add it to the library at Drawing Matter. This is clearly an old story – somewhere we have a copy of one of John Soane’s endless books… Read More
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt
26 May 2021
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt26 May 2021
By Niall Hobhouse
Review By preserving the trees on the site within his pavilion in the Giardini, Sverre Fehn offered Venice an insight into a unique Nordic sensitivity towards nature and the environment. He tempered the harsh Mediterranean sun to evoke the horizontal light of the Baltic through a spectacularly innovative technical design… Read More
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