Still, the new 232-page monograph ABCDCS is a very welcome tribute to the designer's 28-years of creating remarkable spaces. Published by Assouline, the book is very much a David Collins Studio project and is something, as the studio's communications director David Kendall says, Collins was 'obsessed with'. 'It really developed out of a 56-page book we prepared for a ...
For the past few years, Loewe has been on a reinvention race. From a new design direction for its stores led by Peter Marino to the September 2013 appointment of London-based designer Jonathan Anderson as creative director, the Spanish leather goods brand has been undergoing a steady transformation. The next step on its journey is a fresh new identity, unveiled today. ...
Everything about Danish architect Bjarke Ingels seems a long way from a minimalist approach prone to subtraction: his office’s name, BIG; the name of one of his projects, Superkilen(1); his motto “Yes is more”, a rereading of Mies van der Rohe’s historic dictum; his way of moving, working and expressing himself. Excess, saturation and congestion are words that also fr...
An impressive feature of the Japanese pavilion at the 2008 architectural biennale in Venice was the work "Extreme Nature: Landscape of Ambiguous Spaces", consisting of wall installations on the inside and greenhouses on the outside of the pavilion, which was created by Junya Ishigami, an architect who was only 33 at the time. The first impression generated by the cou...
A number of young studios appear to have some answers, which in the process of challenging dusty perceptions are 'Twittering' and marketing their names to the forefront of architecture today ahead of the starchitects of yesterday. 'We sell intelligence, not architecture.' A bold statement, not solely applicable to its source, Oslo-based practice Space Group, but some...
Science fiction – the world after its destruction in the year 2347. This could be a rough description of the first impression created by the photo-montages of the Canadian artist Dave Trautrimas. The run-down, futuristic factory buildings consist of thrown-away household appliances, which Trautrimas places in a new context. By adding architectural elements such as sta...
A monograph that inspires a blockbuster exhibition is another story, however. Yet that's how author Elias Redstone came to curate the Barbican's successful architectural-photography show Constructing Worlds. Redstone was deep into the research of his stunning new volume Shooting Space when the Barbican tapped him for what eventually became 'Constructing Worlds'. The e...
Last spring the Serbian designer cleverly dodged the pronunciation question by rebranding herself as the mononymous 'Roksanda'. She followed with her first boutique, designed by David Adjaye in London's Mayfair, and a plan to expand globally. It would stand to reason her next move would be a rebranding of the entire label. For that, she worked with Studio Frith, the ...
Because of their scale, resources and years of experience, it is perhaps inevitable that large construction firms are often the ones benefiting from the bigger national projects in the country, making larger commissions less common for the small boutique studios. And with few open competitions in the country, the bread-and-butter of the independent architect depends very...
It was a time when architecture was recognised as a worthy investment, when private individuals could easily secure a mortgage, the national government stimulated and directed the Dutch housing supply, and funds for creating good public spaces were generous. Famous Dutch firms such as OMA, Mecanoo, Wiel Arets and Neutelings Riedijk accelerated their ascent at a time when...
The challenge of preserving the tactility of three-dimensional objects on the flat page however, is something that 'Reproducing Scholten & Baijings' resolves expertly. Directed by textile purveyors Maharam and the first monograph of the Dutch design duo, the book is an insightful presentation of Scholten & Baijings' modus operandi, and goes far beyond being just a survey...
The word 'chalet' originally came from Romandy, the French-speaking region of Switzerland, and means something like 'protected location'. In fact, on the drawing board, it was the Alpine huts that cowherds used as a temporary shelter during the summer months that provided the model for this type of construction. The spread of these log-built dwellings throughout the A...
Over the past decade, additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it is more commonly known, has been gradually making the transition from a tool used by the creative industries to produce fast prototypes for testing, to a viable method of manufacturing retail-ready products. However, the machinery and materials remain expensive, and so the huge potential of 3D printin...
Hell is other people. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, that is. The love-him-or-hate-him French existentialist has one of his characters in his 1944 play ‘No Exit’ utter these infamous words, having been locked in a room for eternity with two other unfortunates. Given the circumstances, you can forgive him the sentiment. The enforced sharing of space is something that...
Fast-forward to the 1990s, and bookshops had become megastores incorporating cafés and comfortable leather armchairs where customers could browse for hours and sip cappuccinos. Since then, scores of bookshops have closed because of competition from online retailers, cut-price supermarkets and e-books. Yet booksellers are fighting back, commissioning cutting-edge archi...
True, modernist architects who wanted their buildings to be light-filled often eschewed the use of fired bricks because of their opacity or unwelcome associations with the past – think Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s 1932 Maison de Verre in Paris, constructed from glass blocks. Not that all modernists felt this way. It’s perhaps not surprising that Alvar Aalto, ...
