Archinect - News

The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

2017-06-20T17:22:00-04:00

For Lovecraft, the ubiquitous angle between two walls is a dark gateway to the screaming abyss of the outer cosmos; for Ballard, it’s an entry point to our own anxious psyche.

H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares. Will Wiles delves into the malign interiors of their imagined worlds and the secret history of the spaces where walls meet.

Within and Without Architecture

2017-01-11T17:36:00-05:00

The imaginative possibilities of miniature things lie not in their being shrunken versions of a larger thing. The world of the miniature opens to reveal a secret life.

Sometimes you encounter a thing that is not “properly” architectural, but which yet has something profound to say about the discipline. In her latest article for Places, columnist Naomi Stead is drawn by a cartoon from The New Yorker to consider the relationships between the miniature, the uncanny, and mise en abyme in architecture.

Moravia's architectural landscape

2011-09-26T00:49:00-04:00

But what most attracted me was the architectural landscape of South Moravia — its surprising profusion of castles and chateaus, built between the 12th and the 19th centuries, many of them designated by Unesco as sites of cultural significance.

Evan Rail visits the region of Moravia the lesser known cousin of Bohemia, in the Czech Republic. Along the way he encounters the 19th century architectural follies of the Liechtenstein family, discovers Moravia’s Baroque castles and manages to reference the philosopher Gaston Bachelard.