Pyongyang is a magpie collection of authoritarian forms and styles which draw on influences such as Moscow’s Metro and Haussman’s Paris. Owen Hatherley dips into a collection of essays on and photographs of the North Korean capital’s maniacal monuments.
Clerkenwell Design Week is now a firm fixture in London’s design calendar and the third instalment of the festival is the biggest yet. Here is our preview.
With the 1948 “Austerity Olympics” as its starting point, the V&A surveys 60 years of British design, architecture and fashion. From punk posters to Laura Ashley florals, the exhibition questions contrived notions of national identity to reveal a country caught between modernity and nostalgia. Here’s our review.
In south-east Spain, on Cartagena’s harbourfront, Madrid-based practice SelgasCano has created a vibrant auditorium and congress centre that makes ingenious use of low-cost materials and glows at night like a radioactive Chinese lantern.
Enter now and be in with a chance to win a copy of Thomas Heatherwick: Making, plus a private curator-led tour of the Heatherwick exhibition, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Icon 108 is devoted to Sacred Spaces. The designer Thomas Heatherwick is building an aviary on top of the “Towers of Silence” in Mumbai, where the city’s Zoroastrian community practises its ancient custom of “sky burial”, which involves vultures and other birds of prey stripping cadavers to the bone in as little as three days.
This month, London is abuzz with excitement for Clerkenwell Design Week. Also in the capital, a major Bauhaus exhibition opens at the Barbican and fashionistas flock to a Christian Louboutin retrospective at the Design Museum. Across the pond, Frieze New York takes over Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan, and Tomás Saraceno creates an urban utopia on the roof of the Met.
Dance has always been a multidisciplinary form but the Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand has specialised in striking collaborations, working with leading architects including Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, Diller + Scofidio and Dominique Perrault to explore the limits of bodies and cities