Architecture
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...
21st March 2020
The tragic slowness of our reaction to the coronavirus and the putting of systematic safety measures in place has contrasted with the relatively swift and mature reaction of the French (and other nations) to this emergency. But is it a sign of a wider conservative and sclerotic inability to act that has taken hold of our society? How could we measure these things? Clarisse Godard Desmarest sets the ball rolling with a description of the terrible fires at both Notre Dame in Paris and Glasgow School of Art, and the reaction of the authorities in each case.
19th March 2020
The introduction to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, was written in 1938 but not published until long after his death. It is an attempt to categorically reveal how, through the apparent chaos and convulsions in 19th century Parisian culture and society, great explorations and exposés of the realities of the epoch and its ramifications for later generations, are afforded us by examination of the lives and works of its inhabitants.
27th November 2019
When Marc Augé wrote in The Future that ‘Every protest is a form of research’ he could have been describing the artwork(s) / protest / civil disobedience / celebration / sit-in that was […]
‘Yeah! Yeah! (Post) Industrial ESTATE!’ -Jimmy Cauty In Transit by Neil Cooper