While the headlines this week are about the USA and Cuba improving relations, an international project has quietly been under development in Havana: the creation of a new ballet school in the derelict Cuban National Art School complex. The brainchild of the international ballet dancer Carlos Acosta who is currently directing, producing, and dancing in […]
After the Second World War, the prevailing design for art galleries in Britain was simple white/light coloured spaces in which paintings were hung in a single row with no competition from elaborate Victorian decoration. Ornate plaster ceilings were hidden behind new conservation-driven laylights, the plasterwork smashed to house the supporting steel frames and coloured decoration […]
You would not expect an international design museum to have a traditional pine Christmas tree with gold and red baubles, would you? Every year, the Victoria and Albert Museum commissions a contemporary designer for the Christmas tree in its main entrance. Previous designers have included Jaspar Conran and Helen and Colin David. This year Gareth […]
Given Sir John Soane’s reputation as a designer of funerary monuments, perhaps the most famous being at the Dulwich Gallery or the Soane family tomb at St Pancras Old Church which was the model for Giles Gilbert Scott’s classical telephone box, and also his interest in innovation in his age, it is appropriate that Sir John Soane’s […]
Artists and writers have had an ongoing and enduring fascination with the Book of Revelation and the end of the world, often linked with the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. De/coding the Apocalypse, an exhibition at the Inigo Rooms of King’s College London, examines different aspects of the end of our modern world and […]
Imagine wearing clothes that respond to the warmth and emotion of your body or the environment around you? Or, at an affordable price, designing and having your own woollens made for you in the heart of London? Somerset House, now vacated by the civil servants from Inland Revenue, is entering the next phase of its life […]
Why have the usual Christmas lights when you can do better and have an illuminated forest – an art installation which also celebrates sustainability? At Olympic Park a forest of 14 giant ‘Frozen Trees’ has sprung up, Created from 1,296 reusable and recyclable IKEA plastic bag dispensers, the illuminated “Trees” are planted in the southern […]
King’s Road in Chelsea is rocking again, this time with the best contemporary art exhibition in London this autumn. Post Pop. East Meets West, which fills the three main floors of the Saatchi Gallery with 250 works by 109 artists from China, the former Soviet Union, the UK and the USA, examines the influence Pop Art […]
Architecture as a fashion design for women? Perhaps not likely; fabric designers often celebrate the countryside or nature in clothing fabrics, but rarely urban architecture. This tends to be limited to the occasional silk tie or scarf in an art museum. The media artist and writer Andrea Zapp might be about to change that. Born in Germany and […]
"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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