Our friend Léopold Lambert, author of the Funambulist blog and a writer who's often/quoted/here/at/Socks, just announced the publication of the first … [Read more...]
Hans Hollein’s Alles Ist Architektur (1968)
“Everything is architecture“, Hans Hollein announced in the 1968 (1/2) edition of the “Bau“ journal. As correctly explained by Ethel Baraona, he was … [Read more...]
Computer Graphics’ Archaeology: the HP 9845C Demo
The Hp 9845C , introduced in 1981, was the top-of-the-line model of the 9845 series, it was the very first HP computer supporting color and it was … [Read more...]
Brian Sanders: Artwork Commissioned for the Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Illustrator Brian Sanders was hired by Stanley Kubrick to record the filming of "2001: A Space Odissey. Sanders had free access to most of the set and … [Read more...]
Soviet Abstract Architecture Blueprints (mid-1920s to early-1930s)
Ross Wolfe just published, on his Charnel House, these beautiful blueprints by early Soviet architects Ivan Leonidov, Leonid Vesnin, Aleksandr Vesnin, … [Read more...]
Tango, by Zbigniew Rybczyński (1980)
Tango is certainly a prodigy of pre-digital animation. The experimental short video shows thirty-six characters interacting in one room, moving in … [Read more...]
Tsunehisa Kimura’s Digital Apocalypse
Tsunehisa Kimura (1928-2008) was a Japanese artist, specialized in photomontage. His works usually depict scenes of surreal destruction, caused by … [Read more...]
Pierre-Antoine Marraud, Proposal for a Dystopian Architecture
Some days ago I've been invited as part of the final jury for Pierre-Antoine Marraud (a former student of our atelier at ESA) diploma. This is his … [Read more...]
Relational Cities, by Fabio Alessandro Fusco
Fabio Alessandro Fusco, Italian architect and teacher, made a set of drawings entitled "Relational Cities". The Relational Cities are conceptual … [Read more...]
Book Review: Pamphlet Architecture 11-20
Pamphlet Architecture is a Princeton Architectural Press publication founded in 1977 "as an alternative to mainstream architectural publishing". With … [Read more...]
Mas Yendo Speaking of Himself
Two days ago Socks featured the work of Mas Yendo. Thanks to Stefano Massa (@doctorcrowd on Twitter) we can update the post with a video interview of … [Read more...]
Mas Yendo: Machines for Living in The End of Times
“What I speculate in my work is that new technologies will play an important part in how architects embrace new ideas. The advancement of seemingly … [Read more...]
Oscar Newman’s Underground City Beneath Manhattan
The architect and city planner Oscar Newman, better known for his dreadful "Defensible space theory", (pdf here) also fostered in 1969 the bizarre … [Read more...]
About Metropolis
Metropolis is probably the film that set a standard for 20th century science fiction. The futuristic urban dystopia depicted by Austrian director … [Read more...]
A False Paris Outside Paris: a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed
With exactly the same title, on 6 November 1920, the story of Sham Paris was revealed by The Illustrated London News. Located in the northern … [Read more...]
dOCUMENTA 13: Three Invisible Works
Right after the entrance of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, in a somptuous room where one would expect a big art statement, three works deal almost … [Read more...]
dOCUMENTA 13: News From Nowhere, by Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, [a Retrospective from the Future]
News from Nowhere is probably the most ambitious art-project of Kassel's dOCUMENTA 13. Presented in three forms: a film, an installation, a … [Read more...]
The Future of Architecture and other Collages by Nils-Ole Lund
Danish architect, teacher and collage-artist, author of Collage Architecture in 1990, Nils-Ole Lund's fosters the idea that modern architecture … [Read more...]
There’s nothing you can do about it: Short history of the Architect and the Robot, by Gérard Courtieux (1969)
From one of the most impressive issues ever of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui (Nouvel Environnement de l'Homme, 145/1969), a revealing article about the … [Read more...]
Hiroshi Hara, 500x500x500m, A New Type of Residential Cube for 100,000 People (1992)
Hiroshi Hara's "Multilayered Theory of the City" is put into practice through this model for an utopian metropolis. A three-dimensional lattice is … [Read more...]
Across the Space Frontier, (1952)
A 50's publication on the space age, before 'real' space age was even started. Among the illustrations and cutaways of space stations, rockets and … [Read more...]
Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb? Post-apocalyptic depictions of 80’s Nuclear Paranoia
"Thinking that perhaps some terrible calamity was imminent—a nuclear catastrophe, or a sudden epidemic after a research-laboratory accident—and that … [Read more...]
Stuxnet: Anatomy of the first weapon made entirely out of code
Stuxnet is the first computer virus (precisely a "worm") created to target, study, infect and subvert only industrial systems, namely … [Read more...]
The So-called Utopia of Centre Beaubourg, (An interpretation) – Luca Frei
An epicenter of polemics since its birth, the Centre Pompidou, also known as Beaubourg, (after the working-class neighborhood that once occupied its … [Read more...]