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...
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...
Film Review: ‘City Visions’ #6
Matthew Bloomfield | 7 January 2015 The Airstrip: Decampment of Modernism, Part III. Dir. Heinz Emigholz, 2014 Heinz Emigholz’s ongoing meditation on architecture continues in this feature length piece, composed around the metaphor of a falling bomb. Between the time that the bomb is released and the time that it explodes, there exists a duality where the target remains intact but is doomed to destruction. What the audience...
Film Review: ‘Precise Poetry’
Louise Bjørnskov Schmidt | 05 January 2015 “I’m an architect! I can’t go through walls! I’m not a witch! All I can do with walls is break them down.” This quote by Lina Bo Bardi is not to be understood literally; Bo Bardi did not break many physical walls since she designed only a few buildings through her career. Still, Bo Bardi is today increasingly recognised as one of the most important architects in...
Review: ‘Constructing Worlds’
Felicity Barbur | 02 January 2015 Presenting Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age at the Barbican in London always seemed likely to prove a good choice of venue. However, it wasn’t until visiting the carefully curated spaces of each photographer that I appreciated just how appropriate the Chamberlin, Powell and Bon designed complex would prove to be. After all, over the years the Barbican itself has been...
Film Review: ‘City Visions’ #5
Steve Nash | 2 October 2014 Megacities – Twelve Stories of Survival. Dir. Michael Glawogger, 1998 This film is a tour de force. Part documentary and part fictionalised account of the lives of those fighting to get by in the megacities of Mumbai, Mexico City, New York and Moscow, it is also a visual poem with a dream like qualitywhose images are intended to stay with the viewer for a long time. It is now part of the legacy of the work...
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