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monochrom (Free subscription) | yesterday
Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics—a reading reinforced in cultural representations of Modern Architects, such as Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead (a character widely believed to be based on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). The perception...
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Execupundit.com (Free subscription) | 21/11/2009
Theodore Dalrymple discusses the architect as totalitarian : At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered...
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About Last Night (Free subscription) | 13 hours ago
As if putting up with one set of reviews in a single year hadn't been enough, I'm now in the...
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Crooked Timber (Free subscription) | yesterday
This post is going to have it all: comics, fonts, broadbrush high-lowbrow cultural opinionation, curiously reasonably priced British TV. We’ll start with fonts. Why did the modernists go ga-ga for sans serif? Take Tschichold, my recent subject of study. Early in his career, he dogmatizes that there is something technically obligatory, inherently suited to the Engineering [...]
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THE GOLDEN SMITH (Free subscription) | yesterday
Its fascinating that Le Corbusier was a modernist zealot, well, on paper, at the start... but seemed to just contradict all of that tight modernism with a whole lot of primitive, Picasso-esque, suspiciously colourful, decorative paintings - which I think is very balanced, in truth. "Je suis un acrobate de la forme", he reckoned. And I dont know if his famous l ittle cabanon was all that functional,...
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greg.org: the making of (Free subscription) | 21/11/2009
Wow, who tore up Theodore Dalrymple's urban fabric and replaced it with a tower in a garden? If there were no conservative polemic blogs for cranky, reactionary modernism haters, I'm sure the Manhattan Institute would've invented them. Oy. The Architect...
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Lux Lotus (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
"It is very good, at least once in your life, to start at zero." ––Anni Albers Last night I had the pleasure of attending a sold-out talk at the Museum of Modern Art given by Nicholas Fox Weber, author of...
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Fredösphere (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
This latest in a long line of denunciations of Le Corbusier , written by my favorite atheistic pessimist, Theodore Dalrymple, is a little too heavy on assertion, I agree. If you already have an opinion of Le Corbu's buildings, words like "monstrous" and "ugly" won't change it. I did find one fresh insight, however, and it's the kind that seems obvious in retrospect—which is...
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THE CITY PROJECT (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
As far as the urbanist blogosphere is concerned, the 'networked city' made possible by the iPhone and its applications is the only thing worth talking about. The street as platform ... The kind of program a city is ... This is where the urban buzz is right now. And this is a plea for moderation. Look, I know futurology is shiny and exciting, but let's put this in context. Research from Nielsen shows...
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Mick Hartley (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
The National Theatre from Waterloo Bridge: Still a brutalist nightmare? - or are we now coming round to appreciate its "aesthetic of broken forms"? (Mark Girouard). Architectural opinion was split at the time of construction. Even enthusiastic advocates of the...
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Retro To Go (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
Known primarily for her modernist designs for and with Le Corbusier (like the stylish LC3 armchair for example), Charlotte Perriand designed furniture well into her 80s. Indeed, there are some designs still appearing right now - like the Petalo nesting...
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Artdaily (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
MUNICH.- The rise of the small town Zlín in the east of the Czech Republic to the centre of the biggest European shoe manufacturer Bat'a is a unique economic and social, but also an architectural phenomenon. Zlín is a “model town of Modernism“, since many architectural and social ideals that politicians, entrepreneurs and architects propagated as visionary after World War I,...
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Artdaily (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
LIEGE.- An exhibition focused on the major Liege-born collector and patron, Fernand Graindorge, and the works he donated to the French-speaking Community of Belgium. The hub of the exhibition is the gift of 70 works by famous modern artists. Provided to the French-speaking Community in 1981, the collection includes the output not only of Arp, Magnelli, Matisse and Picasso but also of Csaky, Gorin,...
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The Overhead Wire (Free subscription) | 14/11/2009
I'm always a bit surprised (but shouldn't be) when I read an article like this about how extreme conservatives believe that folks interested in smart growth and livable communities are trying to push their lifestyle on everyone else. They raise the specter of the iron curtain and soviet apartment blocks that were designed and built in the same era as Pruitt Igoe and other poorly thought out urban renewal...
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
For more than three decades Monica Pidgeon edited the Bloomsbury-based Architectural Design (AD). This influential and radical journal was a prime source of information on contemporary architectural culture, and had an international reach. It gave prominence to the work of such architects as Le Corbusier, Jose Luis Sert, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller, and Alison and...
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