Archinect - News

A look back at the iconic Mackintosh style and its radical origins

2018-06-08T15:35:00-04:00

What most caught [German critic Hermann Muthesius's] eye was the work of a young couple, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, who were quietly making wildly original furniture, buildings and interiors. These struck him as utterly “divergent from everything that is familiar”. Fusing the sinuous forms of art nouveau with rugged Scots baronial motifs and exotic Japanese touches, their designs were a startling sight – too much for many British critics to stomach.

Couple Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald built their Mackintosh name into the art deco icon it represents today, yet the duo's designs were far ahead of their time. The Mackintosh art nouveau style, originating in Glasgow, would go on to be recognized internationally. Take a deeper look into the history behind these radical designs as the city celebrates the 150th anniversary of Charles Rennie's birth.

Manual for Becoming a Radical Architect

2016-08-19T13:13:00-04:00

Radicalism in Architecture is not a simple choice and it’s not dominated by the lack of reason, an important idea now that Architecture has become, due to the new technologies and trending fashions, easily reproducible.

A drian Labaut Hernandez states, "Architecture does not need to say anything, it doesn’t need to talk, doesn’t need to express anything specific, and it doesn’t need, overall, to be needlessly “Radical”. Architecture always has a meaning when it is created based on strong conceptual work, the project is there, a body of matter, showing itself immortal, personal, superior because of its inner qualities, those that can not be seen from outside and sometimes even from inside. You need to look at it, speak with it, interact, explore, touch, and at the end, for sure, admire. It is not done for a magazine page, and neither to hang in an exposition room and amaze everybody around because it is ‘beautiful’. Architecture justifies its own existence, it will emerge to create and show its own values, which at the end are completely rooted in life on this earth."

Here's a dose of design inspiration from Superstudio, the radical 1960s "anti-architecture" collective whose influence continues today

2016-04-13T18:23:00-04:00

HALF A CENTURY AGO, a group of 20-something architecture students from Florence decided to assume the small task of conceiving an alternative model for life on earth. Contemptuous of the long reign of Modernism, which they felt had sold itself as a cure to society’s ills and never delivered, they were jazzed by American science-fiction novels and the political foment of the 1960s. They gave themselves the colorfully assured name Superstudio...

Unfolding southamerican utopias: the Clip/Stamp/Fold in Santiago.

2013-06-25T14:35:00-04:00

Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals.

This month the boundary has been finally crossed. It is because the exhibition and ongoing research project Clip/Stamp/Fold has landed in the south hemisphere by this month until July 2013. Santiago has had the chance for this first landing. The local version of the project became real due to the remarkable work of Fernando Portal, Pablo Brugnoli and Andrea Lathrop, whom gave shape to the Chilean participation on the architectural radical magazines of the 60’s and 70’s.

The selected local magazines were proposed according to the main outline: “radical architecture of little magazines”. In this regard, AUCA was immediately considered as one of the first ones due to its invaluable role as one of the bravest publication according to the social impact in the hard days Chile was facing. Architecture, Urbanism, Construction and Arts configure its name as well as the matching with the aboriginal (mapuche) word, which means Rebel. Also AUCA bore a respectable name because it born in t...

The Sky's the Limit: Architecture With an Edge

2012-06-22T20:18:00-04:00

"The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture" (Gestalten, $78) features 135 cutting-edge projects completed in recent years, broken into categories like organic flow, sharp structures and smarter surfaces. The ultimate aim of these buildings, writes Sofia Borges in the preface, is to evoke "pure, immersive sensation."