Architecture

Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and sparkling seas — but not buildings. He was scarcely a topographical artist — an impressionist Canaletto, even if Venice was among his themes. Nonetheless, Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery is an intriguing experience. Before I saw it, the suspicion crossed my mind that this was the solution to a conundrum that must puzzle many galleries. Namely, how to put together another Monet exhibition without it being the same as all the others? An institution such as the National Gallery could not just borrow a lorry-load of Monets and

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital. Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

Over the winter of 1859–60, a handsome young man could be seen patrolling the shores of the Gulf of Messina in a rowing boat, skimming the water’s surface with a net. The net’s fine mesh was not designed for fishing, and the young man was not a Sicilian fisherman. He was the 25-year-old German biologist Ernst Haeckel from Potsdam searching for minute plankton known as Radiolaria. In February he wrote excitedly to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, that he had caught 12 new species in a single day — ‘among them the most charming little creatures’ — and hoped to make it a full century before leaving. Haeckel had a degree

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it properly, not even at the evening parties I’ve been to under Dippy-the-Dinosaur, until now. I visited the new and refurbished Hintze Hall and it was a revelation. The thing that strikes most visitors is that there isn’t a dinosaur any more — Dippy is on tour — and he’s been replaced by Hope, who is a) a blue whale, b) female and c) genuine (the dinosaur was fake). Swings and roundabouts. We have lost a dinosaur, but we’ve gained an entirely new perspective

Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on the Mersey. It’s a city of scale, drama, melodrama, tragedy and comedy. Not to mention rich and poor. And often all these effects are simultaneous. No other British city has a similarly contrary architectural character: superb, shabby, romantic, melancholy, proud and mean. You cannot be in Liverpool and not be affected by its buildings. I grew up there and long before I knew what ‘design’ meant, Liverpool had taught me to see — as well as to feel the deadly weight of history. It’s an architectural education. But Liverpool has

It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty years later, a less accomplished, tone-deaf group of individuals collaborated on the Millennium Dome, and the result was an expensive, sniggerable calamity. For a while, I was one of them. Of course, it was not really a ‘Dome’ at all, since a dome is a sophisticated self-supporting masonry structure and this was just a big, stupid, hemispherical fabric tent. But ‘Millennium Tent’ did not have rhetorical resonance sufficient to burnish the already very bright and shiny egos of its perpetrators during the Blair Dawn. In any organisation, lots of stuff

The house in which I lived in Tokyo was built by my landlady, a former geisha. It stood on a plot of land given to her by her last lover. It was small, full of light and positioned to enjoy the large ginkgo tree in the garden next door. It was easily the best designed house I have ever lived in. Nostalgia for that house and my former life in Tokyo overwhelmed me as I wandered through the new exhibition at the Barbican — The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945. Exhibitions on architecture are notoriously hard to pull off but this succeeds triumphantly. Japanese domestic architecture has consistently

What a strange affair it now seems, the Mansion House Square brouhaha. How very revealing of the battle for the soul of architecture that reached maximum ferocity in the late 1980s and which still echoes today. Where developers now jostle to build ever taller, fatter and odder-shaped City skyscrapers, this was a time when it took 34 years to get just one building built. An ambitious bronze tower and plaza by the German-American modernist pioneer Mies van der Rohe was finally rejected in favour of an utterly different post-modern corner block (with no plaza, but a roof garden) by Sir James Stirling. Both were shepherded by a man in search