On June 27, 1967, a Barclays bank in Enfield, London, debuted what is widely regarded as the first automatic teller machine, or ATM. The machine dispensed £10 at a time through the use of a special voucher that had to be purchased in advance. The system didn’t automatically deduct the amount from a customer’s balance.
In the nineteen-fifties, the designers and developers of Detroit’s Lafayette Park believed that they had thought of everything to make city living as attractive as any suburb. A marquee architect from Chicago, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had created an array of housing options—rental and coöperative—in modernist slab towers, bars of attached town houses, and rows of low courtyard houses.
A new body dedicated exclusively to resolving art disputes, the Court of Arbitration for Art (CAA), will be formally launched 7 June in the Hague by the Netherlands Arbitration Institute (NAI) and the nonprofit Authentication in Art.
‘The South African labour market,’ Charles van Onselen writes in New Nineveh, ‘has always been dominated by … mining, agriculture and domestic service.’ Van Onselen’s two-volume history of ‘everyday life in the Witwatersrand’, a long ridge on the Highveld, explores the period from the mid-1880s when the discovery of gold propelled South Africa through a European-style industrial re
I’m a rock person and she’s a bog person,” says Shelley McNamara of herself and Yvonne Farrell, her partner in Grafton Architects. She’s referring to their respective birthplaces in the stony west and the soggy middle of Ireland. Or perhaps it was Farrell speaking, in which case the pronouns need to be switched – my notes unpardonably fail to keep track of the badinage between them.
Its elegant shape was inspired by ancient Aegean figures and its pleasingly mottled surface made it feel like it had just been dug up from the ground. Yet when it was first sold in the 1970s, this understated vase by the late British potter Hans Coper changed hands for just £250.
Michael Rakowitz’s new work The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist was unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square today, Wednesday 28 March, by the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
Balkrishna Doshi was sitting his in his garden in Ahmedabad—the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat—chatting with his wife and a friend when he received a phone call from Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She asked him if he was still able to travel.
Kunlé Adeyemi hustled across the ballroom in Venice, Italy, with a wide smile on his face. He wore a tailored tunic and pants—classic Nigerian menswear—cut from glossy brown fabric. The staid crowd that had gathered to witness his coronation applauded politely as he beckoned his team to join him on stage.
Frieze Fairs, which manages prestigious art fairs in London and New York, will soon be landing in Los Angeles. Frieze LA, which will feature work from 60 international galleries at Paramount Studios, will kick off in February 2019, the company is expected to announce Thursday.
The owner of a historic Frank Lloyd Wright building in Whitefish, Montana razed the structure last week, immediately after last-minute negotiations with preservationists attempting to buy it fell through. Designed in 1958 — one year before Wright’s death — as a medical clinic, the 5,000-square-foot building is the first Wright-designed one to be demolished in over 40 years.
Architects, like journalists, are fond of giving themselves awards. Then there are the outside organizations — Pritzker, Curry Stone and Driehaus, to name three — whose main reason for being is to hand out design prizes. Nobody is interviewing architects on any red carpets, but the laurels pile up.
Philosophers have a bad reputation for casting unwarranted doubt on established facts. Little could be more certain than your belief that the cloudless sky, on a summer afternoon, is blue. Yet we may wonder in earnest, is it also blue for the birds who fly up there, who have different eyes from ours?
A stone barn in the Lake District, which was the final studio of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, could be moved to China if funding is not found to maintain it, its owners have said.
Herr Glaser of Stützerbach was proud of the life-sized oil portrait of himself that hung above his dining table. The corpulent merchant was even prouder to show it off to the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar and his new privy councilor, Johann Wolfgang Goethe. While Glaser was out of the room, the privy councilor took a knife, cut the face out of the canvas, and stuck his own head through the hole.
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