Category: architecture

Cathedrals of Culture (2014)

Of course, buildings cannot have souls. We are cannot even install them in computers. But a new 3D film by six directors, which began life as a TV series, sets out to demonstrate the improbable. You have to admit these are personable buildings. The roving cameras are accompanied by first person voiceovers…

Barbican Estate, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (1965-76)

There are two Barbicans, we soon learn on a tour of the East London council estate: the multi-purpose arts centre; and the mysterious residential units which sell for seven figure sums. Most visits to the former involve passing beneath the latter. But there is so much more to this brutalist…

Ximena Garrido-Lecca, The Walls of Progress: Project Country (2011)

Amidst the bright, shiny things one could take home from Frieze to put on your wall was this: a structure of mud, daring collectors to take it back to their bright, shiny homes. Hand made from adobe bricks and modelled on an original in the highlands of Peru, this sculpture…

KutluÄŸ Ataman, Mesopotamian Dramaturgies / Mayhem (2011)

KutluÄŸ Ataman has got into the spirit of the Brighton Festival with a carnivalesque metaphor for the recent turmoil in the Arab world: a waterfall which defies gravity. (This reading of Mayhem needs its full context, a series named after a region encompassing Iraq, Iran and Syria. And nearby here…

Review: Modern Times – Responding to Chaos

Exhibition: Modern Times, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, until June 13 2010 Somewhere between art and architecture sits a drawing by minimalist sculptor Fred Sandbeck. His pencil and chalk plan for a Zurich gallery construction hovers in mid air, reminding us of the Utopian potential of pictorial space. The architectural…