Why I hate Blade Runner

Click to enlarge  I saw Blade Runner for the first time on the end-of-the-Summer Friday night of September 2, 1988. I remember it with such accuracy because, at a time where there were only two TV channels available, and I still had no VCR at home, the premiere on television of any movie was greeted

Cook-ing

Sir Peter Cook -the man, the myth, the ringmaster- points at Peter Cook, the comic book character during a dinner in Porto. Anyone who’s thrown even a casual glance at this blog (or at my twitter feed) knows I have a thing both for science fiction and for the visionary architectural scene of the 1960s-70s

Numerus Klausus #15: Underwater Zoom (‘E la nave va…’)

Click to enlarge The original cartoon can be found as originally published in the “Klaus Kube” section of Uncube Magazine #22: Water, edited by Sophie Lovell, Florian Heilmeyer, Elvia Wilk et al, which focuses on Water as a design material, and gathers everything from Matthias Schuler to the Hoover Dam or rei Otto. Federico Fellini, Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’ and Archigram’s

Numerus Klausus #14: [Intermission] A vision of the pneumatic passage (I) – Amaphonia

Click to enlarge “On our third week, we arrived in the city of Amaphonia. Some centuries earlier, the inhabitants of the city had filed a formal complaint, claiming that their architects did not pay attention to the acoustic needs of buildings. They should have known better. As architects’ minds go, this call for attention ultimately

Piano Player Number Two: Illustration for A10 Magazine

Click to enlarge Something a little bit different this time. A couple months ago, Indira van ‘t Klooster, editor-in-chief of A10 magazine contacted me asking if I would be interested in making some cartoons for a series of interviews with different architects they were featuring this year. Yes, A10 is that magazine founded a decade ago by Arjan

The Pharrell Review – Cartoon for The Architectural Review

Click to enlarge “Our built environment and the places we live in are so important to us, socially, economically, environmentally and culturally. Not just on an obvious day-to-day basis, but in relation to some of the big questions of our time – how do we build enough homes and make the places we live in outstanding? How

Numerus Klausus #12: The Big FAT Kill (AKA: It’s a Fat, Fat, Fat, World)

Click to enlarge They’ve built schools like wedding cakes and are making a real-life gingerbread house with Grayson Perry. But the UK’s most playful practice is breaking up after 23 years. They have built a romanesque church out of sparkly blue sequins, a school that looks like a gothic wedding cake and turned the head

2013 recap: Numerus Klausus

So, before January is over, I’d like to post the first one in a series of posts that look back at some of the stuff that happened in 2013 but which, due to the hectic-ness of these last months, had to wait till now. So, as a starting point, I thought it would be nice

Numerus Klausus #10: Shardnado! (AKA: So Long, Piano Man)

Click to enlarge “Why is it the tallest? I don’t really remember. I don’t really care. It was actually taller at the beginning, it was 400 meters, but then aeronautics came and they said that you can not because you interfere with the flight of the air planes. So we broke it. The building is

Numerus Klausus #09: Faulty Towers (Viñoly Attacks!)

Click to enlarge “Developers have promised urgent action to “cover up” the Walkie Talkie skyscraper in the City after an ultra-bright light reflected from the building melted a Jaguar car on the streets below.  The 525ft, £200 million building has been renamed the “Walkie Scorchie” after its distinctive concave surfaces reflected a dazzling beam of