Architecture

Monday

Ruth Bloomfield

Goodbye, Earl’s Court

Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there was fun to be had eavesdropping on conversations littered with ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’. There are some troubling details: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood and the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed  Older generations will remember earlier waves of immigrants. There were the Polish

Tuesday

Jon Morrison

The surprising second life of Colonel Seifert

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the skyline of London was dominated by the work of one architect: not Sir Christopher Wren, but Colonel Richard Seifert. But while Wren is universally admired, Seifert has been reviled. Architects hated his success; the public his uncompromising brutalist aesthetic. Yet now, more than two decades after his death, that appears to be changing. Seifert – who did a spell in the Royal Engineers during the second world war and then insisted on being addressed by his military rank throughout his life – was often said to have had more of an impact on the capital than anyone bar the

Tuesday

Helen Barrett

What will the cities of the future look like?

At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions. David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s Cities Made Differently is

Wednesday

Lara Prendergast

Could AI lead to a revival of decorative beauty?

In front of me is what appears to be an authentic Delft tile. The surface of the tile is mottled, and painted on to it is a picture of a man. The blue tones blur and fade into the edges. Delicate brush strokes are visible if you peer closely. It looks as though it were made many years ago. Except it wasn’t. It was designed this morning by artificial intelligence and created in a small factory near Stoke-on-Trent, using some of the most advanced printing technology available. ‘Josiah Wedgwood would have loved what we are doing… I suspect William Morris would have hated it,’ says Adam Davies, the co-founder of

Thursday

Calvin Po

Who should win the Stirling Prize?

The Stirling Prize is the Baftas for architects, a moment for auto-erotic self-congratulation. Awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, its premise is straightforward: it’s for Britain’s best building of the year. But this year, it seems the prize committee has struggled even with this. Among the six projects shortlisted for this ostensibly nationwide prize, four are in London and a couple could barely even be considered buildings at all. The most tenuous nominee for a ‘best building’ – yet one with the best bookies’ odds – is the Elizabeth Line by Grimshaw Architects. One of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Europe with a much-delayed opening, it remains

Thursday

Austin Williams

Why are Chinese students giving up on architecture?

I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: ‘Who wants to be an architect?’ Not one hand was raised. This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on architecture. They are all hoping to escape architectural education, so that they might progress to classes in AI, digital transformation or some other hi-tech sector where they believe jobs exist. For them, architecture is a dead end. As my Chinese students are discovering, there are too few jobs in the sector, the pay is low

Thursday

Helen Barrett

Never pour scorn on Croydon

‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools. London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’.

Tuesday

Christopher Harding

India radiates kindly light across the East

‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’ So said India’s great national poet Rabindranath Tagore of South-East Asia, after travelling there in 1927. Tagore was fascinated by how elements of ancient Indian culture had found their way eastwards: gods, temple architecture, the Sanskrit language and the great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. A nationalist but also a universalist, Tagore welcomed the reshaping of these ideas by the people who received them, a process whose fruits he encountered in Malay literature and Balinese dance. He even hoped that one day a ‘regenerated Asia’, making creative use of its shared cultural heritage, might heal the world of

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

The beauty of pollution

On the back of the British £20 note, J.M.W. Turner appears against the backdrop of his most iconic image. Voted the country’s favourite painting in 2005, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1838) was Turner’s favourite too. It remained in his possession until his death; the 70-year-old artist swore in a letter of 1845 that ‘no consideration of money or favour can induce me to lend my Darling again’. But I suspect he would have approved of his darling’s current loan, along with that letter, to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle as part of the National Gallery’s bicentenary programme of loans of national treasures to regional museums. Turner relished the atmospheric effects

Thursday

Calvin Po

Forget monetary policy, the Bank of England’s greatest crime was architectural

In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London in the 20th century. It decided to demolish much of its own building, designed by the great Georgian neoclassical architect John Soane. Soane’s lost masterpiece is the subject of the latest series from the essential architecture podcast About Buildings and Cities. The podcast, started in 2016 by presenters Luke Jones and George Gingell as a hobby, has slowly become a fan-funded staple for architects, offering a re-evaluation of the received wisdoms about the canon and some affable banter along the way. He built a rich ‘internal world’, lit by roof

Tuesday

Tim Newark

Jam-packed with treasures: the eccentric Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane viewed it as a reflection of his busy intellect, ‘studies for my own mind’, he said, and Bruce Boucher’s new book reveals how the architect, famous for designing the Bank of England, put together the remarkable collection that visitors can still see today. The author was director of the Soane Museum from 2016 to last year, and his privileged access to its archives ensures we get an insider’s view of

Tuesday

Helen Barrett

The proposed cities of the future look anything but modern

California Forever is an American 21st-century utopian vision, a new city to be built on 60,000 acres of dusty farmland 50 miles outside San Francisco. This latest plan for ‘safe, walkable neighbourhoods’, unveiled late last year and yet to be approved, is financed by Flannery Associates, a consortium of tech venture capitalists led by a former Goldman Sachs trader. Despite its ultra-modern backers, California Forever looks nothing like a modern city. Its promotional material is pure English nostalgia, something close to Metroland, with dreamlike vistas, charming streets, rowing boats, bicycles, sunrises and endless trees. If renderings are to be believed, the future is Blytonesque. This idyll is the latest expression

Wednesday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Mother’s always angry: Jungle House, by Julianne Pachino, reviewed

Jungle House is not the sultry tropical tale you might expect either from its title or from its vivid, palm-strewn dust jacket. Instead, Julianne Pachico’s third novel concerns AI. This is not immediately obvious, and although there is an appealing directness to the writing, it means that no time is spent setting the scene or allowing readers to get their bearings fully. I could have done with more explication of the circumstances in which a young girl, Lena, comes to live in an AI-controlled house. At the book’s opening, Lena has her work cut out: There’s fishing and mushroom-gathering and swimming in the river. Five days a week are for

Wednesday

Calvin Po

I’m not convinced Thomas Heatherwick is the best person to be discussing boring buildings

Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual architect yet still manages to wangle important building commissions. And he knows this. In his documentary for BBC Radio 4, Building Soul, where he examines what he calls the ‘blandemic’ in today’s architecture, he asks to interview fellow Spectator writer Jonathan Meades, who responds: ‘The last person who should be doing a series on urbanism is a designer.’ Heatherwick wears this as a badge of honour. Indeed, qualifying as an architect is no guarantee of quality – check out the past nominations for the Carbuncle Cup, the now defunct prize

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

Fast cars, minimalist design and en suite bathrooms: the real Rachmaninoff

The train from Zurich to Lucerne tips you out right by the lakeside, practically on the steamboat piers. A white paddle-steamer takes you out of the city, past leafy slopes and expensive-looking mansions. Tribschen, where Wagner wrote the ‘Siegfried Idyll’, slides away to the right as you head out across the main arm of the lake. At the foot of Mount Rigi, shortly before the steamer makes its whistle-stop at the lakeside village of Hertenstein, is a promontory where – if the sun is coming from the west – a yellow-coloured cube shines among the trees. This is the house that Sergei Rachmaninoff built between 1931 and 1934: Villa Senar,

Wednesday

Jon Morrison

What Japanese cities can teach us about architecture

There are three things that occur to you when you travel the length of Japan: that kimonos are surprisingly good for any occasion; that the country’s reputation for cruelty may partly derive from breakfasts comprising tea porridge and prawn soufflé; and that the hordes of camera-wielding Japanese tourists taking thousands of snaps – a comic trope in the 1980s, at least – were really just ahead of their time and the rest of us are only now catching up thanks to our iPhones. First impressions of Tokyo might persuade you that you’ve accidentally fallen into a dystopian future: the march of skyscrapers and mesh of streets sprawls greyly on for the best part of

Wednesday

Calvin Po

Policed conviviality: Serpentine Pavilion 2023 reviewed

As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a perverse negotiation as the invigilator struggled with the theoretical parameters of his orders; apparently the watercolour may stain the furniture but dry media like pencils aren’t allowed either; actually, all art-making is not allowed in any of the exhibitions, ‘but photography is OK’. The timber structure has been stained in a shade of brown that

Monday

Jon Morrison

The architecture of the Elizabeth Line

There was much to celebrate last year on the architecture front – the end of the pandemic brought the opening of long-delayed projects ranging from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Hollywood to the Taipei Performing Arts Centre in Taiwan. But there was one construction project that stood head and shoulders above the rest in size and ambition, and that was the transport link formerly known as Crossrail.  The Taipei Centre may have been seven years late and the Academy Museum (now home to Judy Garland’s red slippers and R2D2, among other artefacts) more than a couple of decades in gestation, but that is nothing compared with London’s Elizabeth Line, which was

Tuesday

Ruth Bloomfield

Gorgeous Georgians: the timeless appeal of Regency properties

In the early years of the 19th century, the extravagant, spoiled and hard-partying Prince Regent had a surprisingly good idea. Encouraged by pals like Beau Brummell, and with the financial backing of the property developer James Burton, the future King George IV hired the architect John Nash to design a new London neighbourhood. His vision was for a series of magnificent streets, many in terraces styled like modern sugar-coated palaces, on Crown-owned land just north of central London. These ‘Regency’ homes would encircle a brand new park which, modestly, the future King would name after himself. The first major Regency streets – including Cornwall Terrace (which was designed by an original nepo baby, Decimus Burton, son

Monday

Sean Thomas

How King Charles saved Cornwall

I’m a 30th generation Cornishman. I’m so Cornish my mum can make Cornish pasties blindfolded, my maternal grandmother was employed aged nine to break rocks in a Cornish tin mine (she was a ‘bal maiden’), and my second cousins founded Cornish Solidarity, which is the very-lightly-armed wing of Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish Plaid Cymru). Nonetheless my visits to the county are infrequent, probably because I am not overly fond of rain.  However, on my most recent visit I noticed that something in Cornwall has changed. Perhaps I noticed it because I only go down to the see the folks once or twice a year, so I am made suddenly aware