Architecture, Design & Culture Since 2004
Reading Time: 4 minutes I’m in a dollar store. I’m in a space for contemporary architecture. I’m in a dollar store space for contemporary architecture. There are products, but there is nothing to buy. I’m laughing, but I think I might be the punchline. Maybe I want to cry. I’m at Gag Economy, Dank Lloyd Wright’s (DLW) debut exhibition […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes Walking through a city you assume of course that you are in a heart of civilisation, Deep in a metropolis surrounded by streets and buildings far away from nature. Forms and shapes that have a recognisable scales, significances and meaning: An array of fluted columns, a portico for what was once a bank, a wall […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes There is a video on YouTube of one of the lectures of the late Liverpool-born mathematician John Conway.[1] It starts in the lecture theatre at Princeton. We see him at the blackboard, where he is explaining to his students how rotating a brick in different orientations changes the way you can lay it. He shows […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Static caravans, a term that already embodies a kind of self-cancelling logic. Static like theatmosphere before a thunderstorm, where your hair stands on end as if standing within differentphysics. Static as in lighter than air, the balloon clinging to the ceiling by charged electron alone.Static like the charge built up by friction on a carpet […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes The history of avant guard architecture is in part a search for a holy grail of multifunctional democratic space. Social condensers (as the Russian Constructivists called them), Cedric Price’s celebrated (though unbuilt) Fun Palace, Constant’s New Babylon – always looking for a form of architecture that could liberate its citizens. But maybe the answer was […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes “We saw a picture of it printed in Domus, back to front,” says Howard Raggatt of Australian architects ARM. He’s talking about ARM’s design for the National Museum of Australia, which features a black copy of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, designed to house the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Not actually […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes There is nothing more perverse than a Design Museum. A place specifically given over to the display of things made for the ‘real world’ – things we would usually eat from, wear, sit on, drive or otherwise use. Here though, they will never be eaten from, worn, sat on, driven or otherwise used. Things are […]
Reading Time: 7 minutes If this essay were a documentary, we would begin with a shot of the green-brown water of the river Thames lapping against the alginated stone embankment outside the House of Parliament. We would zoom out while fading to spliced footage of two boats on the river. One, a grainy video, would feature a punk band, […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes It turns out that Francis Fukuyama – yes, that Francis Fukuyama – is quite the amateur carpenter who spends his down time making antique furniture. The American political scientist is best known for his essay The End of History? Published in 1989 while he was working for the State Department, it acted as a de […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes To see Venturi’s original manuscript, all yellow paper, typed hand written, cut up and taped together is a text that seems to be both shredded and composed, as if placing words and sentences together were an act of composition or construction. In fact, one might imagine Venturi with his scissors working on both text and […]