A nice touch as you enter the newly refurbished and extended Norton Museum in Palm Beach, Florida, on the wall of acknowledgements it says in the characteristic font which has been used throughout the Museum: ‘FOSTER & PARTNERS 2019 – NORMAN FOSTER, FECIT’. Opened earlier this month, on the 9th of February, the relatively simple, […]
The Royal Palace in Bucharest has had a chequered history. In 1837, the Wallachian Prince Alexandru Ghica moved his official residence to the mansion in the palace’s current location which, following the Union of Moldavia and Wallachia, became a ceremonial palace and royal residence in Bucharest. Between 1882 and 1906, King Carol I enlarged and […]
Making good use of an unused wing of Ceausescu’s immense Palace of the Parliament, the National Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 2004 with several floors of flexible space connected by new glass lifts up to a rooftop terrace and café. It is currently showing work by a number of Romanian artists including Yael Efrati, Octav […]
A father, mother and child, desperate to seek a new life, float helplessly across the shark-infested waters between Cuba and Florida in a raft made of tyres, with no sail or oars. Hanging down are Polaroid photographs of real-life experiences attached to the painting. A small naked man stands trying to pull a huge floating cloud […]
Opened earlier this year, the George Frederic Watts Studio is the latest phase of the Watts Gallery Artists Village, a hidden treasure trove of Pre-Raphaelite art and design, focussed on the work of the artist and sculptor George Frederick Watts and his wife Mary, located in Compton near Guildford in Surrey. The Studio has been […]
The long ramp from the city is guarded by a huge dog, protecting and guiding strangers down to the entrance around which are towers of stone and titanium like the protective armour of an armadillo. On the other side facing the river, a moat provides protection, with mystical mists and fiery flames blasting upwards to […]
Two major exhibitions on contemporary Chinese art are being held in the UK this autumn. The first is the exhibition of Chinese art from the 1970’s until now at the award-winning Whitworth Gallery in Manchester; the second is the Ai Weiwei exhibtion which opens in September in the Royal Academy in London. There is of course […]
The Leopold Museum in Vienna houses one of the largest collections of modern Austrian art and the world’s largest collection of work by Egon Schiele with a substantial number of works by Gustav Klimt (of whom Schiele was a protégé) and other modern artists and furniture by designers such as Olbrich, Hoffmann and Moser. Housed […]
The Museum of Fine Art in St Petersburg opened in 1965 in a fine neoclassical building located along the ocean front, designed by architect John Volk. Growth in visitor numbers and in the permanent collection necessitated expansion and in March 2008 a substantial addition was opened, designed by HOK to respect and enhance the original […]
The art museums in the Kunstareal (Art District) in Munich have received major investment in new buildings and refurbishment over the last decade, which reinforces the international importance of the collections and the museums which house them. In September 2002, the Pinakothek der Moderne, designed in international museum style by German architect Stephan Braunfels, opened […]
"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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