The Right Time for the Night Time
Alan D Miller | 26 May 2016 The Night Time industries are vital to Britain’s future both culturally and economically. Now that the dust has settled after the General Elections, it is worth reminding everyone that said they are “pro business” and particularly intere ted in the employment of young people as well as small businesses that there is an enormous success story in our capitaland across Britain that is...
White City Black City
Rozie Saunders | 20 May 2015 Sharon Rotbard’s “White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa” is much more than just an architectural history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The author, an Israeli architect and writer born in Tel Aviv, explores its development, and its sister city Jaffa through the lens of someone who has lived there continuously for decades. A critical examination of the accepted history of...
ISIS: The mad residue of the war on terror
Tim Black | 04 May 2015 Patrick Cockburn’s study of ISIS indicts both Saudi Arabia and the West says Tim Black in a review we republish courtesy of the spiked Review of Books. It is April 2010 and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, an extremist Sunni rebel group-cum-terror-franchise responsible for assorted bombings and assaults over the previous half-decade, is at a low ebb. Its two top leaders, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, have...
In defence of a Defence of Stars and Icons
Austin Williams | 20 April 2015 It is a sad indictment of current architectural debate (as well as critical political debate more generally) that Patrik Schumacher’s latest article is creating such a fuss. Fans of Walter Benjamin – the unread darling of the Situationist mainstream – wouldn’t dream of criticising his statement “The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the...
3-d Printed houses?
In February 2015, The Washington Post announced that “a team of Chinese construction workers used a 3D printer to construct houses. By day’s end, there were 10 (houses) standing.” Meanwhile, UK newspaper The Guardian reported “A Chinese construction company is building houses that can be mass-produced using a 3D printer.” Not to be outdone, Time magazine claimed that “A Chinese company (had) unveiled a five-story apartment building...
The Evolution of a Modern Man
Matt Bloomfield | 17 March 2015 Review of Mackintosh Architecture, The Architecture Gallery, RIBA Conveniently coinciding with Prince Charles’ latest foray into Architecture, the RIBA’s Mackintosh Architecture exhibition expertly illustrates the third way between historic pastiche and bland commercialisation. The exhibition brings together Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work from his early days as an apprentice at...
House: The Dematerialized Home
Nicolò Lewanski | 17 February 2015 It is not so often we have the chance to attend a debate where every speaker is precise. When we do it is a pleasure, and such was the case last month when some of the contributors featured in the book SQM: The Quantified Home spoke at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur, this project aims to launch a new discussion on the present and the future of...
The Art of Memory
Jane Sandeman | 02 February 2015 Review of ‘Suspended Sentences’ by Patrick Modiano “A Marcel Proust of our time” was how the Nobel Academy described Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, an award for conferring ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’. Given only a handful of his 25-odd novels have so far been translated into English, Modiano is not exactly well-known in the...
Film Review ‘The Big City’
Martin Earnshaw | 25 January 2015 The Big City (1963), directed by Satyajit Ray, is essentially a story of modernity. The superb opening scene traces the passage of a tram cable as it winds its way through Calcutta, a city which in the 1950s and 60s could be considered as India’s foremost modern city. Although this old Imperial Capital was soon to be eclipsed by Mumbai, at that moment, to be at the forefront of change was to be in...
The fatuous infatuation with well-being
Further to a TES article “Schools should appoint heads of well-being, charity says“, I tracked back the report being cited… then the citation of the citation of the citation within it. Here’s what I found. First of all, what is the TES doing uncritically reporting that “75% of mental illness is unreported”. What could that possibly mean? At best it is a projection, at worst it is guesswork. The actual survey...
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