The city of Wakefield was once known for its coal and textile industries but these have long since gone, victims of the Thatcher government in the 1970s and 80s. Today it is best known as the hometown to one the most renowned British sculptors of the 20th century: Barbara Hepworth. A contemporary of Henry Moore, …
In a previous post we wrote that Bjarke Ingels (1974), founder of the relatively young architectural practice BIG, is amongst the most prominent representatives of a generation of architects that tries and surpasses postmodern conventions, attitudes and strategies. Ingels’ approach to architecture is perhaps best described, in his own words, as Yes is More, sustainable hedonism …
Between October 3rd, 2010 and January 3rd, 2011, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held an exhibition entitled ‘Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement‘. The show presented eleven projects, across five continents, and sought to highlight both the social commitment of the architects (and others) involved and the functinonal, …
Although the Bjarke Ingels Group (2006) is a relatively young architectural practice – younger, in fact, than Facebook – it has rapidly acquired quite a name for itself and has already won numerous competitions, awards and prices. Its founder Bjarke Ingels (1974) has of late dominated magazine covers, editorials and headlines and is the 2010 …
Architects, we wrote in a previous post, struggle to find an aesthetics proper to the metamodern structure of feeling. A particularly interesting exception to this rule is the office of Herzog & de Meuron. ‘In some ways’, we observed: Herzog & de Meuron have always, through-out their careers, attempted to find formal alternatives to architectural …
Contemporary architectural practices do not seem to fit yesteryear’s conceptuali-zations of the modern and the postmodern.Whereas modern architecture (1920s-1960s) was dedicated to the possibility of utopia and the ideal of universal progress, postmodern architecture (1970s onwards) either lost all confidence in societal change, or didn’t feel the need to adhere to a wider social agenda. …
