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From Experimental Epistemology to Experimental Architecture Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Ben Sweeting
A life‐long beacon for Lebbeus Woods was his understanding of the ideas of second‐order cybernetics and attempts to assimilate them into his architectural projects. An introduction to this discourse was provided in Urbana‐Champaign in the early 1960s by his most important intellectual mentor, cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster. Poised at the intersection of architecture and cybernetics, Ben Sweeting
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A Fecund Lucidity: Spadework for a Palace Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Neil Spiller, Aleksandra Wagner
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Framing the Sky, Etching Clay: Walls of the Midwest Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Kevin Erickson
The American Midwest with its own architectural histories and topologies may be termed a land of few walls. Architect Kevin Erickson examines Lebbeus Woods's relation to this landscape and the genesis of his preoccupation with walls, not as protectors of boundaries, but as sites of dialogue and collaboration. Rather than mere surfaces for large paintings, walls – new or abandoned – invite reflection
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Catalytic Moments, Friendships and Journeys Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Peter Cook
When an architectural argonaut whose creative life was spent on a quest to open more possibilities for architecture meets another, a special mutual respect is instilled. Peter Cook, Archigram co‐founder and doyen of the Architectural Association (AA) in the 1980s, recalls his initial encounter and some of the moments he has shared with Lebbeus Woods over the decades.
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Self‐Portrait with Burned Weapon: The Wound That Does Not Heal Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Mark Dorrian
Setting aside organic metaphors of growth and maturation, architect and author Mark Dorrian addresses the ‘early work’ by attending to Lebbeus Woods's descriptively yet evocatively named Black Notebooks. Turning his mind's eye to the Notebooks as a record of the interior struggles of their author – as spiritual diaries – he takes on the symbolism of the wound that must be suffered, and finds much that
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Inventing the World: In and Around Illinois, 1960–75 Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Sharon Irish
Some of Lebbeus Woods's formative years were spent on the ‘flat, treeless plain’ at the University of Illinois School of Architecture and at various home and studio addresses in Urbana‐Champaign. Architectural historian Sharon Irish describes the dynamic setting of this urban stage and Woods's personal and professional preoccupations of the time.
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Lebbeus – A Postmodernist? Early Scenes of Shopping and Dwelling Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Aaron Betsky
Vivid colours, commedia dell’arte, collage and hypergraphics, and villae jutting out of the cliffsides designed for the unknown dwellers – are these projects postmodern? American art, architecture and design critic Aaron Betsky investigates this question and its context, focusing on the V.I.P. Center Shopping Mall, an unbuilt scheme that was to win Lebbeus Woods his first professional acknowledgement
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Attuned Rigour: Between Pictorial and Material Conditions Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Riet Eeckhout
Lebbeus Woods's extraordinary proficiency and mastery in different media was matched by his steady and fast pace of exploration. Riet Eeckhout, a drawings researcher and drawer herself, who teaches at KU Leuven, ponders this dexterity. Her focus is on the rigour of Woods's early works produced in Mylar and pastels, and on the carefully delimited spatial vocabulary – agency obtained through the capacity
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Magical Transubstantiations: A Voyage to Italy Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Aleksandra Wagner, Neil Spiller
Visiting Italy in 1978 as part of his own Grand Tour, Lebbeus Woods was able to see some of the treasures of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The ensuing mix of reality and imagination prompted the Editors of this 2, Aleksandra Wagner and Neil Spiller, to consider the visual travelogue –Cityscapes – in a similar manner, combining speculation and truth.
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Myth and Measure: Drawings of the 1970s Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Lawrence Rinder
Many of the 1970s’ drawings of Lebbeus Woods feature disguised human form. The most classical physiognomies maintain links with a primordial, even reptilian antipode. Lawrence Rinder, Director Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, explores the manifestations of figure in Woods's private mythology, and points to the uncanny synergy of its themes and
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Post‐Apocalypse: The ‘Ring’ Cycle Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Jörg H Gleiter
In the late 1970s, Lebbeus Woods embarked on an ambitious project: to depict Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle. Jörg H Gleiter, Professor of Architectural Theory at the Technical University Berlin, takes us through the intersected worlds of music, drama and visual expression, suggesting that both Wagner and Woods are critics of Enlightenment. Exploitation of Earth, greed and envy are the beginning of
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In Place of Light: On Early Writings Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Eliyahu Keller
Where is one's voice to be found? Not all architects search for it in both drawing and writing. Eliyahu Keller, an architectural historian working at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, examines one of Lebbeus Woods's distinct early tropes: an ever‐tense continuum between the image and the text. His ocular reading of Woods's scripts diagnoses their involvement with a darkness of an age,
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Polymorphic Matters: Architecture, Change and Imagination Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Ashley Simone
Polymorphism was an important tactic used by Woods to render objects and spaces in the process of transformation and transmutation. Ashley Simone, Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in New York City, explores the terrain where materiality meets change, where fantasy supplants reality. Her prime example is the suite of drawings for the ‘AEON’ project.
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Exit Velocity: Einstein Tomb Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Joseph Becker
As the 1970s faded, Lebbeus Woods set about memorialising the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. A cosmic scale and an anti‐gravity mode of this visual and poetic remembrance is embodied in his Einstein Tomb project. Joseph Becker, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, articulates its evolution, marrying Woods's
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More-Than-Post: A Five-Step Recipe for Decentring Design Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Jacopo Leveratto
The importance of a ‘more-than-human’ approach to architectural design is becoming ever clearer. While partly a response to global ecological disaster, this shift also reflects a recognition that design should not seek solely to solve human problems, but to create environments that facilitate emergent opportunities for a wide range of nonhuman occupants and processes. Jacopo Leveratto is based at the
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A Posthuman Architectural Artificial Intelligence Speculum? Text and Images in Future Spaces Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Alberto Fernández González, Mark Garcia
The long-term research project Posthuman AIchitectural Speculations is a collaboration between Alberto Fernández González and Mark Garcia, both of whom are lecturers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and PhD candidates on the Architecture and Digital Theory programme there. Here they investigate how well artificial intelligence can help develop posthuman architectures
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Disruptive Ecologies: Design with Nonhuman Intelligences Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Roberto Bottazzi, Tyson Hosmer, Mollie Claypool
In the last decade, the B-Pro post-professional Architectural Design Master's programmes in Architectural Design (AD) and Urban Design (UD) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London have developed innovative research delving into various aspects of design and digital technologies. Such preoccupations include biotechnology, computation and artificial intelligence, digital fabrication
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Feral Surfaces: Building Envelopes as Intelligent Multi-species Habitats Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Ariane Lourie Harrison
Designing architectural interventions for many species that function and are hospitable for a variety of occupants, creating convivial habitats at a range of scales, is a preoccupation of Brooklyn-based Harrison Atelier. Founder and principal Ariane Lourie Harrison leads us through some of the design collective's award- winning projects. As well as encouraging animal inhabitants, the firm's architecture
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On the Posthuman Charm of Slime and Mould Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Mario Carpo
Slime moulds have no central nervous system and are single- cell organisms, yet they can build communities of themselves to create complex, food-foraging cooperative networks. They are even known to solve mazes in search of something to eat. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, explains the unique
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Alternative Domiciles for the Domestic Posthuman Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Colbey Reid, Dennis Weiss
What are the most appropriate domestic notions, designs and surroundings for posthumans to flourish throughout the different phases of their life? Colbey Reid, Professor and Chair of Fashion Studies at Columbia College Chicago, and Dennis Weiss, Professor of Philosophy at York College of Pennsylvania, explore these terrains and posit some speculative futures that steer away from the sterile Modernist
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Aliens Among Us: The Posthuman Wunderkammer Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Andrew Witt
Architecture has always been about the reconciliation between humanity and matter. Nowadays, as we gear up for a posthuman future, should buildings and spaces be more proactive, challenging their users by asking questions about this multifaceted reconciliation between the biosphere and the ever more advanced technosphere? Harvard University's Andrew Witt, a co-founder of design studio Certain Measures
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Alternate Architectural Subjects: An Apple Tree That Lived on Long Island Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Sylvia Lavin
Exploring how the human became a troublesome concept, Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, takes us to Long Island, where a house was rearranged by an unlikely inhabitant – an apple tree. While trees have typically served to reflect and reinforce idealised definitions of the human, the architecture made for this tree shortly after the Second World War
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Beyond Domesticities: Posthuman Architectures for Animals We Farm Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Paul Dobraszczyk
Ever more astounding numbers of animals are being farmed for human consumption. Paul Dobraszczyk, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, argues that humanity does not see or bother to comprehend the cruelty these animals are subjected to within industrialised farming processes and slaughterhouses. This, he says, is a design issue, requiring more effort to be made
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Flying Feral: Posthuman Architectures, Enclosures and Open-Loop Interface Designs Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Steven Hutt
Architect and advocate of speculative posthuman ecological design Steven Hutt offers new thoughts on the integration of wildlife into our architectures and cities. Awareness of the ‘feral’ as a design tool, the push and pull between indigenous and non-indigenous species, and even old ideas of colonialism are all agents in this new posthuman landscape. There are many aspects of this often anti- anthropocentric
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Learning, Teaching, Coexisting, Thriving: The Evolution of Space Architecture in the Posthuman Era Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Olga Bannova, Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger
Olga Bannova directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) at the University of Houston, Texas, and Sandra Häuplik- Meusburger directs the Space Architecture EMBA at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Here they present the notion of viewing humanity as not superior to other beings and entities, allowing the possibility of the much more inclusive coexistence that will
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Scaling Lunar Habitats from Research Outposts to Thriving Villages Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Xavier De Kestelier, Levent Ozruh, Jonathan Irawan
The development of liveable and fulfilling human habitats in Space is one of the current preoccupations of space architects. Their designs should be highly adaptable, reconfigurable and able to securely accommodate various functional requirements as well as multiple scales of inhabitants and operations. Multidisciplinary design practice Hassell has developed a Lunar Habitat Framework project for the
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Posthuman Space Architecture: Machine Worlds to Seed Space Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Brent Sherwood
Human beings are adapted to dry land and standard atmosphere, and to investigate other areas of the globe such as the sea and the air, let alone Space, we need the multivalent support of numerous machine interventions. Space architect Brent Sherwood explains the huge problems that must be overcome to satisfy our longing to explore extraterrestrial worlds and become truly posthuman as we travel and
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21st-Century Posthuman Spaceship and Spacecraft Architectures Architectural Design Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Mark Garcia
Guest-Editor Mark Garcia takes us on a spatial journey through some of the notions and precedents of spaceships and spacecraft, their fictive and architectural precursors and current conceptual preoccupations. The contexts these new posthuman architectures and posthumans will have to occupy, endure and travel through are mind-boggling in their varied complexity.
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The Portal Galleries: Researching Portals in Fiction from the 19th Century to the Present Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg
The notion of portals to alternative multispaces where normalcy is subverted into magical situations has been a feature of fiction for centuries. Architects and educators Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg have catalogued some of these fictive realms and mechanisms, and developed their own augmented-reality portal to show the results of their research.
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The Home as an Infinite Screen Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Lucia Tahan
The continuing digital tsunami is offering enhanced spatial opportunities for architects. The interaction of real space and virtual space can be choreographed along a spectrum that ranges from our mobile phone screens to full bodily immersion in digital reality. Architect Lucia Tahan exploits these possibilities in her design work using various methods of spatial computing. Here she takes us through
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Hidden Infrastructures: From ‘Spy-Hubs’ to Hollow Buildings that Conceal the New Digital Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Wendy W Fok
There are many examples of large technological infrastructure insinuating its unsightly or bland but big manifestations in our cities, and clandestinely covering itself in deceitful architectural details and typologies. Architect and academic Wendy W Fok co-led the collaborative Hidden Infrastuctures project, which reveals these tactics, used by both data and extraction technologies, to illustrate
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Architecture in Postreality: Emerging Approaches to Space in Hybrid Realities Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Jesse Damiani
For decades, the realm within which architects work was limited to its realworld materiality and ideas of industrialised modernism. This straitjacketed prescription has recently been challenged by the advent of the virtual, through technologies that have blown the profession wide open to new and highly dexterous spatial opportunities that question the old adages that sustained many generations of architects
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Touching, Licking, Tasting: Performing Multisensory Spatial Perception Through Extended-Reality Models Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Paula Strunden
There has been much written speculation about leaving the body on entering fully virtual space. However, it is clear that the only reason we can experience virtual reality is precisely because we are embodied. Transdisciplinary researcher and architectural artist Paula Strunden works at the intersection of the real and the virtual, exploiting our body's important conduits for complete sensory and visceral
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Multipurpose Domesticity: Labour, Leisure and Kitchen Tables Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Holly Nielsen
In the grip of the viral contagion of the recent past and its attendant lockdowns, many of us started working from home for the first time and transitioning to various online communication methods such as Zoom or Teams. However, home working is not a new phenomenon; our domestic spaces have always had to embrace and adapt to multifunctional activities they may not have been designed for. The introduction
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Conjunctions Or, Space as Oxymoron Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Giacomo Pala
Traditional architectural thought and practice decrees that buildings should be spatially homogeneous, revealing themselves to their viewers and users as episodic and carefully orchestrated wholes. Giacomo Pala argues that the world is more complex than this, and that the digital has further enhanced its heterogeneous festival of formal, semiotic and spatial jump-cutting to establish conjunctions from
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Celebrating the Glitch: The Multispatial Work of Ibiye Camp Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Owen Hopkins
Artist Ibiye Camp exploits the supposed exactitude of digital technologies and uses its potential for glitches as imaginative tools. Her work focuses on the African continent and its diaspora. Guest-Editor Owen Hopkins talked to her about her working methods and the spatial opportunities they provide.
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Architecture is Interface: Latent Virtuality from Antiquity to Zoom Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Joshua Bard, Francesca Torello
Architectural educators Joshua Bard and Francesca Torello embrace numerous digital technologies to subvert issues of scale, framing, materiality, inside and outside to provoke viewers into contemplating the current nature of architecture and its discourse. Their inspiration is Sir John Soane's Museum in London, which is a multilayered conversation between objects and their interrelationships with themselves
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Very Big Art: Follies, the Public and Multispace Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Andrew Kovacs
Very Big Art uses a variety of both virtual and real media to create a nexus where architecture, the public realm, urban design, performance, ephemerality and art meet at an often colossal scale – a 21st-century reworking of the notion of the architectural ‘folly’. Architectural designer and educator Andrew Kovacs describes a brief history of some of the early exponents of arch-art, and leads us through
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Ways of Worlding: Building Alternative Futures in Multispace Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Alice Bucknell
The integration of the real and the digital – particularly gaming engines – offers architects and designers the opportunity to develop narrative environments that can be predicated on speculative fiction. Such spaces, landscapes and buildings explore magical panoramas created not just by human ingenuity, but also by machine and nonhuman intelligence. Artist and writer Alice Bucknell takes us into some
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The Anti-Metaverse: Multispace and the Intersections of Reality Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Micaela Mantegna, Marcelo Rinesi
Virtual spaces offer the incredible mix of opportunities and risks that are only available when designing a new universe (almost) from scratch. Arguing that these spaces are just as real as the ‘real world’, Micaela Mantegna and Marcelo Rinesi point out that architects are obligated to share their intellectual and visualising skills beyond the discipline to give more of humanity the possibility of
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All At Once – From Zoom Fatigue to Immersive Digital Experiences: Why Architecture Must Adapt Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Sasha Belitskaja
The constellation of digital techniques, software, visual and haptic prosthetics is growing exponentially by the day. Such innovations allow all manner of choreographed synthesis between the world we see, unaugmented, and the world we experience through our devices. With her practice iheartblob, Sasha Belitskaja makes Surrealist architectonic interventions and installations that straddle the virtual/
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Shifting Contexts: Liam Young's Prototypes of Architectural Futures Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Owen Hopkins
Digital technologies and visualisation techniques are changing the site(s) of architecture, as well as the notion of context and how architecture responds to it. In an interview with Guest-Editor Owen Hopkins, architect and filmmaker Liam Young discusses the shifting nature of ‘site’, architecture's possible futures and the centrality of speculation for the profession.
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Transforming the World: The Architectural Art of Brian Clarke Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Paul Greenhalgh
Brian Clarke is one of the UK's foremost international artists. For the last four decades he has specialised in creating highly beautiful stained-glass work, instantly recognisable for its bright and arresting colours. His work is often thoughtfully integrated into buildings, providing them with a special sense of place. Paul Greenhalgh, Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, investigates Clarke's
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Dance of Light and Line: When an Architect Turns to Art Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Ian Ritchie
Ian Ritchie is not bound by stylistic fetishes and long-established, old-fashioned protocols of solving architectural problems. Each of his projects is designed from first principles, even before spaces and materials are projected. He prefers to get to know his clients and their organisations in extreme detail. At concept stage he uses the other arts to inspire his outputs – poetry, etching and painting
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Presenting a Truth: Ben Johnson – Painting Illusions Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Neil Spiller
In a wide-ranging interview with AD Editor Neil Spiller, architectural artist Ben Johnson charts the course of his career to date – from his formative years at art school, through his epiphany moment when architecture took its key place in his practice, and beyond. He recalls the impact of painting the work of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, particularly the reflections caused by their use of glass
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Exposed Agency: Poetic Architectural Projection Across and Between Disciplines Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Felix Robbins
The combination of an understanding of architectural history and a compositionally advanced architectural ‘eye’, integrated with a PhD in second-order cybernetics, has shaped the preoccupations of architect Felix Robbins's work. Here he describes his architectural world and his ongoing projected speculations within it.
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Recollected in Tranquillity: Brendan Neiland – Changing Sensibilities Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Paul Finch
Artist Brendan Neiland's art is exuberant. It rejoices in the world and in beautiful juxtapositions of the manmade and the natural, revelling in anything from the blooms of flowers to the neon nights of the city, high-speed trains and the sensuous lines of some cars. He likes high-code aesthetics conjoined with the low, all of which he renders in a palette of vivacious, spray-painted colour. It is
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Connections: Time, Landscape, and the Art of Andy Goldsworthy Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Eva Menuhin
The oeuvre of artist Andy Goldsworthy utilises ‘found’ natural objects like leaves, rocks, ice and sticks to create captivating, often ephemeral interventions into the natural landscape that remind us of the power of natural beauty and the continuously changing seasons. Architectural writer Eva Menuhin discusses some of the traits in his work, which has recently become more monolithic yet is still
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An Alchemist of Super-Cooled Liquid: The Art and Craft of Danny Lane Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Neil Spiller
Sculpting with glass is often the choice of artist and designer Danny Lane. He can combine it with steel, timber, acid etching and numerous other techniques and materials, yet at its root Lane's life's work is glass. He teases it to its limits for artistic effect – extruding, moulding, dripping, colouring, striating, cracking and nibbling at its edges. The other partner in his arsenal is light, the
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Dynamic Reciprocities: Exploring the Site of Production Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Peter J Baldwin
There is another type of art produced when creating work – a kind of second-order art. It consists of what is left over after a piece is made: the residue, the detritus of creation. Some contend this is often as important as the initial piece itself. Architect and teacher Peter J Baldwin has long held that this is the case. He leads us on a journey of creative archaeology through some architectural
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Tectonics of the Familiar: The Transposed Landscapes of Zoe Zenghelis Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Hamed Khosravi
As a founder member of the now international practice OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), Zoe Zenghelis was responsible for some of the group's early iconic representations of its buildings. In recent times she has practised as a lone painter creating a plethora of work that is at once abstractly Constructivist yet gorgeously architectural as she mixes form and colour. Architect, teacher and
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The Artist as Contemporary Philanthropist Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Kathy Battista
Artists can have a remarkable impact on the rejuvenation of city districts and blocks, both through their own presence and through community artistic engagement. American writer and curator Kathy Battista shows us a number of ways this type of engagement has helped in differing areas of the US, and the creative and social benefits it has brought with it.
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Canaletto: Synthetic Compositions of Maritime Greenwich Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Simon Withers
Southeast London benefits from some of the finest historical buildings the city has to offer, and Greenwich is particularly notable for the Queen's House, the Old Royal Naval College and other magnificent edifices of maritime history. Using all the relevant technology available to them (drones, LiDAR scanners and ground-penetrating radar), Captivate – a small research group of academic architects,
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Utopian Geometries: Turning Forms and the (Science) Fictions of Utopian Architecture Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Nic Clear
It is possible to give previous artworks by other artists a new lease of life as the prima materia for further artistic endeavour. Architects Clear + Park, based in West Yorkshire, have been doing just this with a sculpture by the renowned artist Barbara Hepworth – not by renovating or relocating it, but in an act of digital appropriation. Having 3D scanned it, they manipulated the point clouds produced
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Neo-Fluxus: Multimedia Performance Art and Architecture Architectural Design Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Mathew Emmett
Space Interface is a collaboration between artist-architect Mathew Emmett and the legendary Eberhard Kranemann, a German neo-Fluxus artist and founding member of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. Here, Emmett describes how, through mixed-reality performance and audiovisual installation, their work transforms architectural settings by using video and electronic improvisation to evoke extended levels