Poor Venus. Once the Roman goddess of beauty and love, rising from the sea in a seashell as long ago as the first century AD in Pompeii, she now stands armless and naked in the Louvre, having to smile quietly at the millions of tourists who crowd round and clamour to take selfies with her […]
The circle suggests that everyone is equal and can be segmented in a variety of ways to reflect different parties and groups, like a pie-chart. It also avoids the adversarial atmosphere of two parties throwing insults at each other across a divided rectangular chamber. The European Union Parliament Building in Strasburg is circular as is New […]
Thatched roofs, timber frames and building using hemp and lime – “hempcrete” to the latest technology in biomas generators, solar power, photovoltaics, hydrogen fuel-cell cars, plumbing and drainage plus reuse of building materials such as steel frames are all here at this year’s EcoBuild. It doesn’t seem that long ago that sustainability was one of those strange […]
Two astronauts, Daphne and Apollo, like their Greek namesakes, are flying on a quest, to explore new worlds where no-one has gone before, far beyond the current limits of knowledge and experience where something new and unexpected may be found. Daphne and Apollo, created by the Canadian artist Sarah Fortais, are made of materials found on […]
If you were selecting something of your own that signified the modern world, what would you chose and how would you commemorate it? Would you select hardrives, an ethernet cable, a pair of trainers, a broom or a deconstructed VHS player and VHS showreel? These were the choices of staff and students at Oxford Brookes […]
Two artists who use architecture as their inspiration show their work together for the first time at the Ashmolean Museum in the city of dreaming spires. One creates perfection; the other depicts the chaos of life. Growing up in Oxford and now living in London, silversmith Vicki Ambery-Smith uses the sculptural forms of architecture and engineering in […]
Long slithering snakes and Chinese dragons, lion’s heads, Leonardo di Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, Jesus Christ, angels, skulls, daggers, film stars, Japanese masks, love hearts with Cupid’s arrow joining the names of current and former lovers – these are just some of the many images with which people decorate their bodies through […]
Was 1964 one of those years in which the world turned on its axis and changed for ever? Did the people living at the time (like me) realise the changes that were happening they hung around the juke boxes in cafes or sat up in their bedroom with friends playing the latest pop music? In […]
Tonight’s Evening Standard (Friday March 4th 2016) quite rightly blows the trumpet for £1.2 million of grants being given from the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund to 85 grass-root groups across 23 London Boroughs tackling poverty and social issues in deprived housing estates in London, bringing the total grants given by the Fund since 2010 to […]
"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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