Tag: humour & satire
What’s a Bludder Sketch?
28.02.2022
What’s a Bludder Sketch?28.02.2022
As a timid foreigner in the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, shuffling through hundreds of important-looking drawings, I stumbled across a funny little sketch in whose lines I found some humanity. It was made by Bengt Lindroos in 1981 and is an imagined view of his office with the… Read More
Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation
05.03.2021
Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation05.03.2021
Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More
William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’
26.11.2020
William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’26.11.2020
On 22 March 1921, The Times reported on ‘the urgent need of a green belt being preserved round London.’ It was the first recorded use of the phrase. By the time William Heath Robinson came to makes sketches for ‘Tightening the Green Belt’ (c.1935–47), the urban ring o’ roses was familiar enough… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Hugh Casson’s ‘Diary’
06.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Hugh Casson’s ‘Diary’06.11.2020
Hugh Casson did it in the car. He did in in the Opera House, in Westminster Abbey and at the Buckingham Palace Garden Party. He did it in Goa, Mykonos and at Loughborough University. Wherever he went, whatever he saw, he drew. He drew to keep his eyes keen and… Read More
Instead of an Article (1958)
03.06.2020
Instead of an Article (1958)03.06.2020
‘As I cannot write an article, this dialogue is intended to replace it. It is only partially authentic, but that, of course, is also the case with the classical dialogues.’ Alvar Aalto in Arkkitehti-Arkitekten (1958): Sigfried Giedion: ‘What do I see, old friend, are you planning to write?’ Alvar Aalto:… Read More
Spaghetti with Meatballs
20.01.2020
Spaghetti with Meatballs20.01.2020
I was born in Berlin in 1943 and came to the US in 1949 when my father got a position at the University of Illinois. I was interested in history, art and mathematics, so I studied architecture there. I interrupted my studies to work in an office in San Francisco… Read More
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’
23.08.2019
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’23.08.2019
The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More
Learning from the Tortoise
09.08.2019
Learning from the Tortoise09.08.2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
Heathrow Airport Project
25.01.2017
Heathrow Airport Project25.01.2017
These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… Read More
Pier Leone Ghezzi
20.01.2017
Pier Leone Ghezzi20.01.2017
This drawing by the Roman artist Ghezzi depicts an unusual funerary monument, commissioned by the Sacchetti family for their beloved donkey called ‘Grillo’ (Cricket). According to the extensive inscription, this clever and loyal animal regularly carried baskets all alone from central Rome to the Sacchetti’s Villa Pigneto, ten kilometres away.… Read More
From the Desk of John Summerson
01.08.2016
From the Desk of John Summerson01.08.2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son
04.07.2022
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son04.07.2022
– Robert Lutyens
We have republished below an extract from Robert Lutyens’ short biography of his father, published in 1942, while Robert was serving in the RAF and two years before Edwin died. The book itself is uncomfortable — an odd mixture of personal portrait, family background, and an attempt to at once… Read More
humour & satire