In 1770, James Cook sailed along the east coast of Australia, and claimed New South Wales for Britain. Only 8 years later, the British Crown Colony of New South Wales was established, which resulted in the foundation of Sydney and the settlement of other parts of the continent. Back in England, the Prince of Wales […]
Born in 1888, German artist Josef Albers joined the Bauhaus in 1922 showing his flexibility and dexterity across different media including furniture and architectural glass where he collaborated with artists such as Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. With the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 due to Nazi pressure, Albers moved to the United […]
Perhaps Russia in the decades after the 1917 revolution is summed up in the very last room of the Royal Academy’s exhibition “Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932” which shows the blowing up and demolition of the 19th century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 1931, on the orders of Stalin, in order to clear […]
It seems strange now, but Green Park tube station in London was, until 1933, named Dover Street Station and it was only during a major refurbishment to install new escalators that the Dover Street entrance disappeared. This perhaps explains some of the reasons for the extensive underground walkways connecting different lines. One of Dover Street’s […]
This February sees London celebrating Yorkshire artists and designers, with the David Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain and, this week, Henry Moore and Christopher Bailey, chief creative officer at Burberry, at Makers Space in Soho. Burberry was founded in 1856 and opened its shop in the Haymarket in London in 1891. Seven years later the […]
Star fish travelling down the English Channel, up the River Thames to London and up the Rivers Rhine and Main to Frankfurt. Could Nessie the Loch Ness monster also manage to leave Loch Ness and escape into the Moray Firth, down the coast and similarly across the Channel and up the rivers to Frankfurt, to look […]
It’s funny how things change use with time. When I was a boy, pipe cleaners were for cleaning tobacco pipes, were only available in white and, as school children, we bought them from the newsagent to use as a makeshift modelling material, to be bent, shaped and twisted into stick figures of people and animals, […]
Celebrating the best collections of British modern art: Sussex comes to London. In 1916, the Bloomsbury Group established an outpost in Sussex when Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Charleston near Lewes, with Virginia Woolf and her husband taking over the nearby Monk’s House in 1919 and, a little later, Lee Miller and Roland […]
In 2014, fire ripped through the Glasgow School of Art destroying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic art nouveau library in which Glasgow artist Nathan Coley (born 1967) no doubt spent many hours when he studied at the Glasgow School of Art between 1985 and 1989: “We were in Paris, and had just finished lunch when my brother messaged […]
On the wall are digital artworks, so it could be an art gallery, but, then in the dark space, the explorers see streams of water cascading down the wall, flowing across the floor, swirling around their feet and slowly disappearing behind them, surrounded by glittering butterflies, flowers and lights. Are the explorers in an art gallery […]
"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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