Tag: humour & satire

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

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

What’s a Bludder Sketch?

What’s a Bludder Sketch?

Declan Quirke

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

Make me Hyper-Real: image ethics and the architectural visualisation

Daniel Innes

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’

William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’

Laura Freeman

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’

Writing Prize 2020: Hugh Casson’s ‘Diary’

Laura Freeman

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)

Instead of an Article (1958)

Alvar Aalto

‘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

Spaghetti with Meatballs

Andreas von Foerster

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’

Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’

Niall Hobhouse

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

Learning from the tortoise

William Firebrace

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

Zaha and Aldo Self reflections

Zaha and Aldo Self reflections

Heathrow Airport Project

Heathrow Airport Project

Catrina Beevor

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