An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)
The urban plan for the district of Pendrecht, in the south of Rotterdam, is one of the most representative projects of the urban theories developed in Europe in the post-war period. It was part of a series of studies for the expansion of Rotterdam through polders, artificial sectors of land gained … Read More
A hugely influential Dutch architect and theorist, Aldo Van Eyck conducted a thirty-years-long (1947 – 1978) research through practice designing hundreds of public playgrounds in Amsterdam while working for the Urban Development Department. Appeared after World War II, (the first one was built in 1947), the playgrounds slowly found their place in derelict sectors … Read More
In 1953, Alison and Peter Smithson designed a house for themselves for an infill site in Colville place in Soho neighborhood, in London, on an area bombed during the war. Confronted with the everyday reality of post-war England, the Smithsons decided to accept the given conditions, those of ‘a society that had nothing‘ (*). The … Read More
In his Dictionnaire des termes employés dans la construction …: volume G.-Z, (1872) Pierre Chabat, wrote: ‘Considered from the point of view of external form and ornamentation, a large number of wells of all ages can be regarded as true works of art … ‘ This is why the taxonomic enterprise undertaken by J.-N.-L. Durand in 1800 and … Read More
David Katz’s Psychological Atlas (1948), is a collection of drawings, photographs, diagrams, and charts used by the author, a renowned psychologist and professor at the University of Stockholm, to illustrate his lectures. The work was published with the intention of “arousing a zeal for the study of psychology”. As stated in the foreword, the author, invited to speak … Read More
The issue 78/79 of Design Quarterly (journal published in 1970 by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) was completely dedicated to possible definitions of Conceptual Architecture. The author, architectural writer John Margolies, invited 11 artists and architects to provide their own visual account on the subject. Margolies’ letter was also used as the textual cover for the issue, hence … Read More
Japanese architect, sociologist, and educator Kon Wajiro was living in Tokyo when the violent 1923 earthquake occurred. With his students, he visited the areas where people gathered after the natural disaster. Through simple yet refined drawings he began to register the temporary shelters and the sparse belongings of the refugees in order to testify their … Read More
During the twentieth century’s Great Migration, the Hickmans were one among many African Americans families looking for affordable housing in Chicago. They were fleeing the sharecropping system of the rural South looking for the jobs, education and freedom promised by the industrialized North. Yet, what they found, was scarcity of housing, segregation and tragedy. In … Read More
Cornelis Meijer (Cornelius Meyer) (1629-1701) was a Dutch hydraulics engineer that came to Rome in 1680 to assist in the design of the banks of the Tiber river, the diverting of the water and the draining of the Pontine marshes. His two-volumes book Nuovi ritrovamenti (1689), (available in pdf online from the ETH Rara page) is … Read More
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