Architecture

Architecture | Design

F5: Issi Nanabeyin on Exhibitions, an Architect + Market That Inspire

Exploring work in between design, architecture, and art, East London-based Issi Nanabeyin defies genres. He searches within the university and beyond, carving space for larger perspectives, underrepresented voices, and diasporic identities. Issi digs deep to create spaces, objects, and artworks…
Architecture | Design

The C House: A Hidden, Half-Hexagonal Gem in the Dutch Forest

Hidden deep within the woods in the eastern part of the Netherlands, a striking C-shaped retreat has recently been completed. GetAway Projects has designed the innovative residence, named the C House, as a recreational escape for up to six people…
Architecture | Design

The Tane Garden House Is Built Upon the Memory of a Place

The places we remember as children – especially those explored unsupervised and guided by our own curiosities – quietly and often imperceptibly go onto shape the spaces we desire to inhabit as adults. A favorite tree, a quiet warm corner…
Architecture

Architectural Narrative: “New York City: The Edge of Enigma” by…

In 1991, Francisco Javier Rencoret, a Chilean architect and then Fulbright scholar at Cornell University, published New York City: The Edge of Enigma, (Princeton Architectural Press), a visual essay that retraces the myth of the foundation and development of New…
Architecture

Matmata: Underground Dwellings for an Extreme Climate

The ancient Berber village of Matmata in South Tunisia, located between the Eastern coast and the desert, is characterised by settlements of dwellings dug into the clay-gypsum layers of the ground. The dating of the first inhabitations is uncertain. In…
Architecture | Modern Homes

Timber and hempcrete form patchwork facade of London mews house

Hempcrete walls and a patchwork facade characterise Hempcrete Mewshouse, a three-storey home that local studio Cathie Curran has added to a derelict site in east London. Located in Forest Gate, the home was built around a gridded structure made from…
Architecture

Carlos Morago. Across the Ordinary Interior

Contemporary Spanish painter Carlos Morago depicts realistic interior scenes that are mostly reduced to the bare minimum: light floors and walls and sporadical furniture. Empty corridors and rooms are framed through opened doors and walls while opening on uneventful exteriors…
Architecture

A Building to Tell the Time: The Toghrol Tower in Rey, Iran (1063)

The Toghrol Tower is a 20 meters high tower located in the city of Rey in Iran made of bricks and Sarooj, a water-resistant mortar. It was erected in 1063, and according to some sources, it was conceived as the…
Architecture

A City in Retreat: Les Devantures by Sandrine Marc (2018)

Sandrine Marc is a photographer and artist based in Paris with a specific interest in self-made editions. She investigates urban and suburban territories through slow, long walks immersing herself in mutating environments. In December 2018, after the first demonstration by…
Architecture

Claude Bragdon: Drawings of the Fourth Dimension (1913-1915)

American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866-1946) was also an artist, writer and stage designer. He was based in Rochester, NY where he built his masterpiece, the New York Central Railroad Station in 1909. His design work and philosophy were influenced…
Architecture

This Is A Record Cover: Text-based & conceptual album covers. A…

The second album by British new wave band XTC did not feature any images. Instead, a written essay about how buyers are attracted by album covers to buy records was used. The paragraph, which begins with: “This is a record…
Architecture

Fragments of an Unknown Civilization: Works by James Lipnickas

James Lipnickas is a New Haven-based artist and graphic designer. He creates highly evocative scenes representing small architectural stages in axonometric projection. Suspended stairwells, excavated blocks, and plinths separated, or all combined are located in deserted territories in a surrealist…
Architecture

The Square and the Circle: The Palace of Charles V in Granada (1527)

The palace of Charles V in Granada was built starting in 1527 as a summer palace for the emperor. The Renaissance building is located inside the Alhambra, the former Nasrid complex on Sabika hill, a notable example of Islamic architecture. …
Architecture

Poetics of the Greenhouse: Works by Bernard Moninot

Bernard Moninot is a French multimedia artist. Over the 1970s and the 1980s, he produced a series of drawings, (inks, crayons and acrylics) of greenhouses based on various modes of representation, from axonometric projections, to outside central perspective or interiors…
Architecture

Michelangelo Caetani’s Six Topographic Maps of the Divine Comedy

As a follow up to the latest post on Norman Bel Geddes’s stage set design for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, here we feature the six maps drawn by Michelangelo Caetani in a book titled La materia della Divina Commedia di…
Architecture

Stage Design as a Narrative Device: Norman Bel Geddes’ Stage Set…

American stage and industrial designer, director and producer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) worked on a theatrical staging of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy to be performed in Madison Square Garden in 1921 on the sexcentenary of Dante’s death. Geddes planned…
Architecture

Madeleine de Boullogne and Louise-Magdeleine Hortemels, Abbey of…

Madeleine de Boullogne, (1646-1710), was a baroque artist born and raised in a family of painters. Extremely pious, she remained unmarried and lived a semi-monastic life entirely dedicated to working and teaching. Among the most important commissions, she produced a…
Architecture | Technology

Botany as an Artistic Practice: Anna Atkins’ Blueprints

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was a British botanist and photographer. She was in direct contact with William Henry Fox Talbot, (the inventor of calotype, an early photographic technique), and with Sir John Frederick William Herschel, (the inventor of the cyanotype, a…