The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: architecture

  • Cartographies of the Imagination

    Cartographies of the Imagination

    Cartographies of the Imagination explores the outer limits of what a map can be, interrogating the bit of lost land that falls between the pages of an atlas, journeying to places known, unknown, forgotten and fictional.         INTRODUCTION To map a place is to create a whole new one. Maps may begin…

  • + Other Cartographies

    + Other Cartographies

    Kiara Marina Firpi Carrión reveals the motivations behind + Other Cartographies, a research project to highlight work by women map-makers.

  • A space, an ambiance, a home

    A space, an ambiance, a home

    A modest row of cottages is set apart from Cambridge’s Castle Street by a small green on one side and St Peter’s Church on the other, right next to Cambridge University’s ancient Magdalene College and the backs of St John’s. You’d be forgiven for barely noticing the terrace that makes up Kettle’s Yard. Entering the…

  • Architecture for All

    Architecture for All

    Maria-Chiara Piccinelli is director of PiM.studio Architects in London. She is a strong believer in the importance of public spaces for a city to thrive, and in the crucial role nature plays within architecture. She began her career in Italy, and has since worked in Tokyo, Edinburgh and Paris with Kengo Kuma & Associates, and…

  • Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    I had no intention of bicycling in the snow, this winter. I started riding just seven months ago to stave off the inevitable corrosion of old age. I have no tolerance of cold. I grew up on the beaches of Sydney, where anything below 15ºC is thought of as gelid. In Berlin, the average winter…

  • Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House

    Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House

    The silvery tinkling of servants’ bells welcomes me into the house of merchant Joshua Gee. There’s a fire in the grate and sweet treats on offer in the Still Room where I’m handed a candle to illuminate the winter afternoon, a parchment inventory of household goods and a quill pen so that I may note…

  • Traces – Lives, Loves and Loss

    Traces – Lives, Loves and Loss

      “Every story, however hidden, leaves a trace…” A company specialising in site-specific, immersive experiences, Traces brings together contemporary art, theatre and design with old and disused buildings in order to reimagine the long-lost stories of the past. A collaboration between furniture and spatial designer Donna Walker and Talulah Mason, whose expertise is in sets…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    I am an inexperienced cyclist. As far as possible, I avoid Berlin’s main arteries and stick to the backstreets. Bike lanes constricted by car traffic, tram tracks and intrusion from roadworks and heavy construction make me nervous, so my routes are often haphazard interconnections of empty footpaths, public and corporate plätze, service alleys, old river…

  • A New Map of Berlin

    A New Map of Berlin

    Fehrbelliner Strasse intersects the indefinite, porous border between the old East Berlin neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Forming a T with the sloping green space of Volkspark am Weinbergweg, the street is lined with pretty late 19th-century altbauten that had survived artillery and aerial bombardment at the end of World War II, and featureless…

  • Dead Space and Ruins

    Dead Space and Ruins

    Few things capture the present like the ruins of the past. After the lofty projects of the twentieth century have crumbled or collapsed, we are left today with certain reminders: literature, memories, a socio-political legacy, and – more photogenically – the rotting ruins of sundry grand architectural schemes. The connection between architecture and utopianism has…