King’s Cross continues to demonstrate what the best design-focused urban regeneration can achieve. With The Granary housing Central Saint Martin’s at its heart, expansive and interesting public spaces and a blend of new buildings by the best architects alongside refurbishments such as Thomas Heatherwick’s Coal Drops Yards, King’s Cross has set a standard which others […]
What will be the toys of the future? Children just love playing with building blocks, being able to create new forms and structures from a range of shapes, hence the success of LEGO. Many children, who may be future architects or engineers, will try to pile them up into towers that challenge gravity until […]
A short walk along the riverside from Doon Street at Waterloo and, rising in front, you discover an immense timber head on one of the old jetties, the face staring out across the River Thames, in the background of which multi-coloured ribbons create an arch going out into the river on a second jetty. Together […]
It almost makes you want to give up and throw your smartphone into the River Thames, such is the quality of the finalists on show in the Bargehouse for the 2018 Blueprint Architectural Awards . The textures, the shadows, the contrast between black and white, showing different aspects of architecture, urbanisation and the impact on […]
This year’s Design Junction has moved to the south side of the river – shock!, horror! Last year’s site at King’s Cross near Central St Martin’s is no longer available, having been landscaped and redeveloped, but fortunately the unloved and under-utilised car park at Doon Street has provided a new location. It is astonishing to […]
The London Design Festival grows from strength to strength every year and is now probably at its optimum size as it is at the point where a visitor to London would find it impossible to do everything. Looking beyond the showcase exhibition areas, where the national stands, as in previous years, are the best, […]
No longer does the standard uninspiring exhibition hall coffee and sandwich bar suffice, especially for an international design event. To be successful, design exhibitions need good pop-up cafes, bars and restaurants which show leading trends and use the best of contemporary furniture, lighting and innovative design in addition to providing superb food, coffee and cocktails […]
If the grey hulking mass of the former Central St Martin’s Building in Southampton Row, London has ghosts of its former students and staff walking through the empty rooms, left almost as they were when the doors were closed and the School moved to its magnificent new building at King’s Cross, then they would be […]
"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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