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Colin Fournier, popular Archigram co-founder and UCL professor, passes away at 79

2024-09-17T12:35:00-04:00

Colin Fournier, the British architect and planner who helped form Archigram with Sir Peter Cook and others in the early 1960s, has passed away at age 79. He was best known for the firm’s 2003 Kunsthaus Graz and work with Bernard Tschumi on the design of Parc de la Villette in Paris.

A commemoration from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture notes: “In addition to his architectural practice, Colin was a dedicated and well-loved educator. He joined The Bartlett in 1998 and inspired generations of students for almost two decades with his distinctive approach to design. As Professor of Urban Design, he was instrumental in the formation and directorship of the Urban Design MArch and led the successful Unit 18 on the Architecture MArch programme for several years with a number of teaching partners. Colin inspired countless students and colleagues throughout his life, and his absence will be felt profoundly by all who were fortunate enough to know him."

In a statement to the Architects’ ...

Adolfo Natalini, co-founder of Superstudio, has passed away at age 78

2020-01-24T20:24:00-05:00

Adolfo Natalini, who, along with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, co-founded the visionary architects' collective Superstudio, has passed away at age 78.

Natalini was born on May 10, 1941 in Pistoia, Italy. He attended the University of Florence, graduating in 1966. That year, he and di Francia, who passed away just last year, founded Superstudio. The designers Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro and Roberto Magris joined in short order and the rest is history.

View of Superstudio’s iconic “Continuous Monument” proposal. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, Howard Gilman Foundation.

Together the design collective worked to extend architectural imagination to include the so-called radical architettura movement that the team helped to propel into being through visionary works like The Continuous Monument collage series, among many others. The group dissolved in 1978.

Torre Natalini (Roermond) in The Netherlands. Image courtesy of © Raimond Spekking.

In the years following, Natalini ...

“In which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam”

2019-08-19T14:30:00-04:00

Prada Poole conceives the city of the future through what he calls “the three stages of a nonexistent architecture.” In this conception, the traditional city would, in successive transformations, morph into an immaterial city, without inertia, in which the solid buildings would be replaced by the accumulation of foam that would “appear and disappear, converge and disperse according to the different needs.”

Antonio Cobo examines the revolutionary work of Hippie Modernist architect and theorist Jose Miguel Prada Poole for Mas Context.

Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs: The Opera

2014-04-24T16:27:00-04:00

It's the urban planning equivalent of Rinaldo. Except instead of the siege of Jerusalem, it's the battle for Greenwich Village. The legendary 1960s struggle pitted planning czar Robert Moses against neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs. Moses wanted to make the city easily navigable by car [...] But the powerful planner met his match when he proposed an expressway through Lower Manhattan. Though she had little institutional support, Jacobs built a citizen coalition that ultimately defeated Moses.