Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley is an honorary fellow of the RIBA, a trustee of the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust and the co-founder of London’s design museum.

An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book

Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the superstars of German art history. After Richard Schlagmann acquired the imprint in 1990 Phaidon maintained, even enhanced, its reputation for good design, but visual style was prioritised over editorial substance and writers were marginalised. That

The only way is Essex University

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand

The camera always lies

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music. But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s

My addiction to the bullet train

In 1963, Dr Richard Beeching, an ICI director with a PhD in physics, a qualification that clearly boondoggled his credulous political patrons, published a government report called ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’. It identified 8,000km of painstakingly created track for closure. At the time, road transport seemed just the thing. Lorries? Bring them on! Commuting

Ettore Sottsass, Jnr: more than just a funny name

Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures.  More than 30 years ago, Frederic Raphael wrote a teasing piece in the TLS mentioning an Italian designer with a funny name, as if to disparage design as a whole. I boldly wrote in defence and,

The best exhibition of architecture I have ever experienced

Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse parts of the architect’s vocabulary. But while Gothic, Classical, Baroque and Modern are well-thumbed volumes in his library of style, the architect’s real language is profound and prehistoric. Or, at least, it consists of prehistoric-style

The man who gave the world (but not London) the glass skyscraper

Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred by debased familiarity. You have been to Catford? You have seen a heroic vision compromised. Modern Architecture is no more threatening than abstract art, although the Swiss-French Le Corbusier retains a heady whiff of the

Dear Simon Jenkins, please stop moaning about developers

When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and unventilated ‘heritage’ world-view, the word ‘developer’ is spat out with contempt. It is as though they are speaking of Satan and his diabolical agents, who used to appear in the horror novels of Dennis Wheatley

Is Richard Rogers still a rebel?

‘Lounge suit’ is normally a reliable signifier of supine gentility. But there it was on the invitation to Richard Rogers’s 80th birthday retrospective. Can this be the same architect once praised by a president of RIBA for his admirable ‘sod you’ approach to the public? The same man the Parisians sniffily called an ‘English hippie’

Adhocism, by Charles Jencks – review

Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some exculpatory, older and wiser material fore and aft). Adhocism (re)captures with magical realism the boldness and silliness of its day.  This was the day when ‘new media’ meant colour television. Younger readers may need more

The Jaguar F-Type is no E-Type

In 1951, Arthur Drexler, an influential curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organised an exhibition called 8 Automobiles. Drexler, who used to wear a bow tie, was one of the people who helped make ‘design’ the credible subject it is today. The press release said it was the ‘first exhibition anywhere of automobiles

Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review

Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the sometimes directionless rich, a brighter star than most of his astronomically stellar client list. Considering a joint project, I asked him over lunch to tell me all the amazing people he had met. He demurred,

Mauvais goût

It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense.