John Duffin’s new exhibition at the Catto Gallery in Hampstead, London is focussed on the London along the river, with many paintings and etchings of bridges across the River Thames, atmospherically-lit by coloured skies or full moonlight. , John Duffin, born in the industrial town of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, England, started his career as as a draughtsman […]
Photographers love London – the light, the geometry, the variety of architectural forms and the reflections of the cityscape and its lights in the River Thames. Square Mile magazine, the lifestyle magazine for the bankers in the City of London, has an article Cometh The Tower on photography and the changing skyline of London. It shows […]
The exhibition Smarter London at the Building Centre, London explores how data, technology and computer analytics are changing the way the building, transport and environmental professions design, build and manage a complex and growing 21st century city such as London. It illustrates a variety of “smart projects” in London from a wide range of organisations […]
Closing at the end of the month at the South Bank Centre in London is an exhibition of art created by a unique group of artists – prisoners, offenders on community sentences, secure psychiatric patients and immigration detainees. “Catching Dreams” is the seventh exhibition in collaboration with the Koestler Trust the prison-arts charity and not […]
Two exhibitions on the work of American artist Jamie Wyeth, located almost 1200 miles apart, give a complimentary view of his work at the Museums of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and St Petersburg, Florida. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is exhibiting a broad retrospective of Wyeth’s work over the last sixty years. Wyeth […]
Manchester’s Art Gallery, designed in classical style by Charles Barry and opened in 1824, had a substantial extension 12 years ago by Hopkins Architects, which also incorporated another Barry building the Manchester Athenaeum, designed in 1826. Hopkins’ work is a well-detailed modern but austere composition of glass, concrete and steel. It comes into its own […]
Interior designer Briony Fitzgerald and architect Stuart Forbes Associates have transformed half of the the ground floor of the New Wing in Somerset House into a light stylish interior for Spring, the first solo restaurant venture for Australian chef Skye Gyngell. The original features of the former 19th century dining room have been restored and […]
Technology and design is to the fore in the exhibition “Inside Rolls Royce” presented by Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and held at the Saatchi Gallery in London before going on tour to major cities around the world in 2015. Not only does this provide an amazing insight into the relentless search for perfection and the innovative […]
In Glasgow in Scotland, the historic Govanhill Baths are gradually being brought into a new community use. Over 4000 miles away in St Petersburg in Florida another swimming pool lies empty with proposals for a new community use, this time as a music venue. The historic YMCA building was built in Spanish style in 1926 at […]
While the high streets of cities and towns in the UK are looking to reinvent themselves, they might look across at St Petersburg on the west coast in Florida. Originally founded in the 1870’s and 1880’s, the city grew slowly until it boomed from the 1940s to the 1970s as the town became a popular American […]
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
(Thomas Moore)
To be an architect means having a wide range of interests - architecture, art and creativity in all its variety of forms, sustainability, science and innovation. The greatest interest is often where these different worlds overlap and collide - that is when something imaginative often occurs that pushes us all forward to another place
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