Architecture

14th June 2023

MAKING HOME : The Fight to Save the Wyndford (ArchiFringe 23)
Kelly Rappleye

What is going on in Wyndford ? Barnabas Calder (in his book reviewed by Florian Urban in The Drouth August 21) tells us that Architecture, and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement, is the worst of climate change culprits, yet in Glasgow a whole estate is about to be pulled down and rebuilt. We are supposed to be on the brink of some massive changes in our way of living -but not just yet! Kelly Rappleye has organised an event which might enshrine Wyndford not so much as a cause célèbre as a cause désastre.
16th April 2023

A LIFE EXAMINED


Hutting at Carbeth
with Morven Gregor & Gerry Loose
GREG THOMAS

The hutters at Carbeth dwell in the forest -when they can get there. They have a history: it's a green one and a working class one; it's one of urban folk in the countryside, and they're prepared to fight for it. Greg Thomas speaks to a couple who make and remake their stand in the forest.
29th March 2023

A BALCONY IN CHICAGO
by
Murdo Macdonald

Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.
12th January 2023

What Should an Art School be? by Murdo Macdonald

A meditation on those places where you can learn to see things and make things, and mess around with materials and forms and colours, usually for no particular purpose other than what Murdo Macdonald calls here a 'true education'. What will come of it, what has become of it?
3rd June 2022

GLASGOW COOL OF ART: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library by Johnny Rodger reviewed by MURDO MACDONALD

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

RAW & GREEN? :
Barnabas Calder on Architecture and Energy
by Florian Urban

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

‘Yeah! Yeah! (Post) Industrial ESTATE!’
-Jimmy Cauty In Transit
by Neil Cooper

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

Feminist City :
City of Possibility
Andrea Gibbons

'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

A Sanctuary for Furies
by Tor Scott

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.