Helvetica may still be the only typeface to have starred in a movie. But another great European font, which turned 90 this year, has had a still more profound impact on the world’s visual culture. An excerpt from a feature on the cultural history of the typeface Futura I wrote for The New European.
The 2000th anniversary of the Roman poet Ovid’s death, far from home on the shores of the Black Sea, prompted some thoughts on the condition of exile, as experienced then and now.
An excerpt from a feature for the September 2017 edition of boom saloon magazine. The great Victorian social critic William Morris feared the industrial age heralded the end of skilled workmanship. But do emerging 3D printing technologies open possibilities for a new era of craft, realised through techniques Morris could never have imagined?
Jeremy Corbyn’s serene countenance during the election campaign drew frequent parallels with that of a Buddhist monk, Corbyn himself at one point referring to his efforts to attune himself to a Zen mindframe. But when watching Corbyn deliver his speech at Glastonbury last week, it occurred to me that a comparison with another spiritual archetype might be more appropriate.
An unexpected opportunity to see images from Ivan Leonidov’s City of the Sun series at The Design Museum’s Imagine Moscow exhibition.
The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect by Marwa al-Sabouni is a profound, understated meditation on architecture’s capacity both to civilise and destroy, written while the author witnessed first-hand the destruction of her native city of Homs.
Some time in the mid-1970s a student came to London from Iraq with a vision of how architecture could remake the world. Remarkably – and eventually – she succeeded.