History
Beijing: Modernising History
The demolition of the protected home of China’s most prominent 20th-century architect exposes the tension between preservation and progress, says Anu Leinonen
Essays
Architecture Becomes Music
As abstract art forms based on rhythm, proportion and harmony, architecture and music share a clear cultural lineage. Now, through digital expression, architecture can attain new heights of creative supremacy
Computers in Theory and Practice
A landmark new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture unearths the digital pasts of architects Peter Eisenman, Shoei Yoh, Frank Gehry and Chuck Hoberman. Exploring the particular story of four projects, taken together they show how the computer has radically changed architectural design for ever, argues Tim Abrahams
The Evolving Role of the Drawing
Read individually, drawings offer vivid and unique character portraits of their architectural authors. And today, argues Nicholas Olsberg, the dexterity of the hand is still unbeatable in quickly conveying an architectural idea
Troubles in theory Part iv: The social side
Techno-fetishists may have argued for a scientifically determined architecture in the ’60s and ’70s, but at the same time more politically engaged voices were calling for the reinterpretation of space as an arena for the lived experiences of the everyday
RUINS OF UTOPIA
Built by Moisei Ginzburg in 1929 as a Constructivist machine for radical living, Moscow’s Narkomfin Building immediately fell foul of Stalinist orthodoxy and now rots in a climate of state neglect and apathy
The Big Rethink: Urban Design
The fundamental purpose of urban design is to provide a framework to guide the development of the citizen. As this AR campaign reaches its conclusion, the penultimate essay attacks the City of Doing found in modernity and calls for a return to the spatial and social richness of the City of Being - necessary for the flourishing of humanity in the 21st century
Skill: Inflatable Concrete Domes
Frustrated by both expensive and labour-intensive methods of moulding concrete with steel or wooden formwork, Italian architect Dante Bini pioneered ‘air structures’: gigantic balloons that could be covered with a thin layer of concrete then inflated to form domes in a matter of hours
AR History
AR History
The Architectural Review was founded in 1896, on the cusp of the 20th century. The cover of the first issue bore the legend ‘a magazine for the artist and craftsman’, though this subsequently became ‘artist, archaeologist, designer and craftsman’, thus firmly setting its sights on Victorian polymaths everywhere
AR Archive
2002 February: The American Museum of Folk Art
Exuding a rugged, sculptural power through form and materials, a museum of folk art in Manhattan is a luminous backdrop for the exhibits
February 1976: Hertzberger's Framework for Care
Sutherland Lyall explores the inner workings of open community living for the elderly without the clinical aesthetics of a hospital, but instead beginning with a bare concrete structure
1962 October: Royal College of Art
As the Royal College of Art continues its campus expansion south of the Thames, the AR looks back to its original coverage of the groundbreaking Darwin Building on Kensington Gore
1999 April: Planet Niemeyer
Luis Oliveira examines Oscar Neimeyer’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro.
1989 July: Whats wrong with architectural education? Almost everything
Peter Buchanan critiques the state of architectural education, claiming it is neither current or credible ” not only have curricula not been revised and extended accordingly, most schools now fail even to impart adequately such traditionally crucial skills as an understanding of construction”
March 1975: Late works of Scharoun
Hans Scharoun’s architectural reputation is re examined by Peter Blundell Jones, focusing on three programmatically innovative schools designed late in his career.
1954 April: C20 Picturesque, Nikolaus Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner defends the AR’s promotion of the Picturesque; ‘The first feeling-your-way theory of art in European history and far the greatest contribution England has made to aesthetic theory”
1930 June: Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia
AR’s inter-war discoveries of Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona and the state of “the great Church of the Holy Family”
2004 January: Sitting Pretty, 'Sitooterie' by Thomas Heatherwick
This spiky pavilion in the landscape is a highly ingenious exploration of form and materials
1993 April: Mies' miraculous survivor, Villa Tugendhat
The house that Mies van der Rohe built for Grete and Fritz Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia, has endured the attentions of the worst regimes of the twentieth century. The restored villa reflects the robust, enduring nature of the original design and construction.
