Reputations
AUGUSTUS PUGIN
Assessing the legacy of Big Ben’s creator on the bicentennial of the architect’s birth
Reputations: Pancho Guedes
To his friends, colleagues and pupils Pancho Guedes is a unique source of creative inspiration and wisdom
Reputations: Alison and Peter Smithson
Steve Parnell elaborates on the extraordinary lives of The Smithsons
Reputations - Mies van der Rohe
William J R Curtis, author of the seminal texts Modern Architecture Since 1900 and Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, writes on the ‘lucid quietude’ of Mies van de Rohe
FROM BERLIN TO NEW YORK: THE ZIGZAG CAREER OF DANIEL LIBESKIND
William JR Curtis tracks the uneven trajectory of Daniel Libeskind’s career, from early success to later derailments
Obituaries
Theory
Reassessing Postmodernism
As a major exhibition opens at the V&A on the same subject, Charles Jencks has published an account of Postmodernism’s historic and unfolding story. While the author includes many recent architectural projects, these later examples emerge as antithetical to the movement’s original intent. But if the current crop of architecture is devoid of meaning, could Postmodernism find a future in the complexity of the city and a world of rapid scientific and technological transition?
TROUBLES IN THEORY PART ONE: THE STATE OF THE ART 1945-2000
Becoming a subject of interest to those beyond the profession in the late 1960s, architecture - and its theory - in turn opened up to outside influences. An anti-institutional ideology, with strong French philosophical connections - Foucault, Barthes, Derrida - served to undermine architecture’s own disciplinary focus. Key figures - Summerson, Banham, Eisenman - sought to regain the lost territory, but a unified theory of architecture remains elusive. The first of three essays outlines ...
The Autopoiesis of Architecture dissected, discussed and decoded
In the autopoiesis of architecture, Patrik Schumacher introduces a new unifying theory of architecture. Peter Buchanan decodes, dissects and weighs up Schumacher’s arguments
