Architecture
3rd June 2022
A new book 'Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library' takes a personal, artistic, intellectual and critical view of the two fires in Mackintosh's masterwork. It attempts to square the trauma that the fires caused by looking at the effect on a wide range of people -adults, children, citizens, academics, artists, architects, and as Murdo Macdonald notes in review, addresses the challenge of the international worth or otherwise of that great building.
1st August 2021
Form follows Fuel -or is it, Form follows Food? -Or both? In advance of COP26 -and our own specially timed 'Climate' issue in November, Florian Urban assesses Barnabas Calder's new book. Its exposé of Architecture - and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement - as the worst of climate-change culprits is interesting, to say the least, in the light of Calder's published panegyrics on Brutalism...
26th May 2021
Comic Pranksters or Guerilla Interventionists? Why would anyone from a Scheme (or an ESTATE as they pump it up down there) scheme to burn a million quid? Neil Cooper lets loose on Jimmy Cauty's installation ESTATE and all the music and art and film around it which is coming your way...
23rd December 2020
'Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies', runs the blurb on on Leslie Kerns' book feminist city published by Verso. Writer and housing activist Andrea Gibbons takes a critical read, and ponders on why our cities are still made for and by 'mostly men', and what are the possibilities for other, better cities for all sorts of bodies and beyond the already charted pathways...
27th October 2020
Historically the marginal realm of the feminine, the home for women artists was not always the mere prison of patriarchy. Tor Scott introduces the surrealist women who rendered the domestic sphere as visionary spaces for alchemy and transformation.
7th August 2020
Dear Hunter are designers, map makers and ‘cartopologists’ who engage with the supposedly empty spaces of borderlands, ex industrial landscapes and wherever their blend of art, architecture and anthropology is most needed. Reaching into both past and future, their distinctive practice shows how the map is never more powerful or effective than when treated as a verb.
18th July 2020
Powerful personality and polymath par excellence – Patrick Geddes has been plastered with so many labels that it sometimes seems that he’s all but disappeared from public perception. How should we rate Geddes and his work now? R J Morris puts the new critical work by Murdo MacDonald in context.
22nd March 2020
Written before Macron's lock-down, of course, Jeremy Allan Hawkins observed that Parisians were walking through their city again. But did he see the same type of dilly-dallying, louche, truth-seeking, urban hanger-on as Baudelaire's flaneur? Or the existential and psycho-geographical explorers of Guy Debord's Situationists? Not quite...
What Should an Art School be?
by
Murdo Macdonald