The Drawn World That Travels Without a Passport
How anime travels across cultures, reshapes visual imagination and offers an analytical lens for local identity, design and architecture.
Art
ArchUp coverage and criticism across art, exhibitions, museums and visual culture.
The Green That Could Not Survive Its Own Purity
What fragile green paint on Coromandel screens reveals about conservation, matt finishes and the relationship between colour, care and interior design.
The Object That Is Dry and Fragile at the Same Time
Why historic leather can lose flexibility and cohesion together, and what evidence is needed before testing a sesame oil and PVP treatment.
The Wall That Rewrites the Play
How textual scenography and theatre architecture shape action, visibility, time and audience knowledge, with a practical framework for rehearsal and design.
The Body That Wears Our Identity
How clothing, mannequins, uniforms and exhibition spaces help construct identity. An analytical reading of effigies and embodied representation, with practical design applications.
Hayy Jameel, A Little Too Reserved
Ibrahim Fawakherji — ArchUpI did not visit Hayy Jameel to test how quickly I could walk. I went to see…
The Value Is in the Verb, Not the Noun
Place two images side by side on a screen, pixel for pixel identical, and tell one room of people that…
The Louvre’s Stretch Marks: An Architectural Reading of a Museum That Never Sleeps
A critical architectural reading of the Louvre as an aging body under the pressure of memory, visitors, maintenance, and the billions of steps that pass through it.
The Louvre Without the Mona Lisa
A visit to the Louvre highlights the overwhelming cultural and physical influence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Despite its…
I Went to See Calder, and Found a System Trying to Escape the Canvas
The exhibition traces Alexander Calder’s transition from representational paintings of industrial life to the development of kinetic sculpture. His early…
