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Review: 1984
George Orwell’s dystopian classic is given a stage treatment. It’s torture, says Owen Hatherley. |
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Review: Ed Ruscha at the Hayward
It’s hard not to see this seminal artist’s work as a celebration of ephemeral America – but these days its glamour is less obvious. |
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Review: Bunker
Robert Kusmirowski’s sinister installation at the Barbican Curve gallery feels more than just historical. |
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Review: Woman as Design
An arsenal of arses, a bounty of breasts and a lesser number of other female parts get enthusiastically ogled by Stephen Bayley in this bizarre book. We see the women, but where’s the design? |
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Review: Ground Control
Anna Minton’s book about regeneration, crime and urban policy will make anyone who cares about the future of British cities very angry indeed. |
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Review: Telling Tales
The V&A’s exploration of fantasy and fear in contemporary design is light on comforting bedtime stories and heavy on anxiety. |
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Review: Gocycle
Does the magic red button of the Gocycle’s electric motor destroy the fundamentals of cycling? |
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Review: Radical Nature
What do artists and architects have to say about our abusive relationship with the natural world? And since that topic is so timely, why does the most radical work come from the 1970s and 80s? |
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Review: 49 Cities
Ideal and utopian urban plans are condensed, measured and compared in this fascinating study. Will it help us map out our future? |
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Review: Hidden Forms
Collecting everyday design can seem like an end in itself, so it’s good to see the mundane treasure of a Swiss professor made useful in this ingenious book. |
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Review: Framing Modernism
Modern architecture was fascist Italy’s way of pretending to be civilised – the result is an eerie collection of photographs, says Owen Hatherley. |
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Review: Synecdoche, New York
A man builds a second Manhattan in a warehouse and wrestles with the big questions of death, truth and reality in Charlie Kaufman’s new film. |
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Review: Terror from the Air
Peter Sloterdijk's book argues that the 20th century began with the first military use of poison gas, and spins a fascinating alternate history of modernity. |
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Review: Objectified
Gary Hustwit's film Objectified, a feature-length look at product design with an all-star cast, opens today. Here's what we thought of it. |
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Review: Militant Modernism
It's good to see modernism wrestled out of the jaws of the middle classes and the heritage industry, says William Wiles. |
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Review: London Yields
The Building Centre tackles urban farming, the hot architectural topic of the moment - a possible way for cities to save themselves and the world. |
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Review: The Belt
Photographer Neil Montier’s The Belt, showing at New London Architecture, is a series of slightly altered images of London’s periphery. |
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Review: Limited Edition
Packed with interviews and photographs, this is a first-rate survey of the "design art" scene. But is it a picture of a young cultural phenomenon or an elegy for the boom? |
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Review: Vorspannkino
Little works of art within a film, the opening credits can combine utility and beauty. Francesca Gavin admired the best in a darkened room. |
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Review: Three short films
We were fortunate in February to be able to go to see not one but three new short films about architecture. Here’s a quick roundup of what we saw. |
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Review: The Philip Johnson Tapes
A fascist activist who stripped modernism of its social value, Philip Johnson has a lot of explaining to do. Do these final interviews shed any light on a slippery enigma? Owen Hatherley found out. |
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Review: The New Routemasters
Boris Johnson wants a new bus for London, to smite the socialistic Bendies. The result is a convoy of cuddly clones, says William Wiles. |
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Review: Designs of the Year
On Tuesday evening, we went to the Design Museum for the opening of the second Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition. Here’s a quick look at some of what we saw. |
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Review: Mydeco.com
Here comes the hive mind - a website with 30,000 users producing hundreds of thousands of interior designs using real furniture, voting for their favourites and blogging about design. It could be the future, says William Wiles |
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Review: Mesmerization
We’re at the mercy of sexy over-simplification, says this snazzy book full of brightly coloured infographics. William Wiles looked at the pictures |
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Review: The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture
Another humungous slice of global building, and Edwin Heathcote discovers that the more different everything gets, the more samey it becomes. |
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Review: Ron Arad No Discipline
From the hand-painted “No Discipline” of the exhibition graphics to the graffitied floors and the film showing his hands-on approach during the set-up of the exhibition, Ron Arad is desperate to let us know that he has been personally involved in the realisation of this retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. |
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