The street is dark, but lights can be seen through a few of the windows in the tall apartment block, while friends linger in dim light on the staircase. Nearby, looters have been at work, helping themselves to an unprotected jewellery store and young people are sitting, chatting, smoking and drinking of the steps of the […]
Here we are in Mayfair, not far from Bond Street, where we might be in a top store which in the 19th century would have been selling high quality ceramic vases from China, or from one of the renowned European porcelain houses such as Meissen, or from one of the best potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, to […]
By coincidence, while the London Architecture Festival takes place across the city in June, Isaac Julien is celebrating the work of Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) with lively colourful photographs and a video installation at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Lina Bo Bardi started her career in Rome, then Milan, before moving to […]
Many years ago, actually I am horrified to think that it was some 40 years back in time, I was responsible as a project manager for new galleries at the National Gallery, fitted into old light wells with the first exhibition being on the ‘Golden Age of Danish Painting’, then quite radical in bringing this […]
The Francis Crick Institute at St Pancras is one of the world’s leading bio-medical research centres for research on the diagnosis and treatment of modern diseases. To do that, as the exhibition currently on show there demonstrates, scientists look for patterns which they can then break up and manipulate. Outside, like a symbol of the […]
American artist Sarah Sze, though in a different way to Carlos Garaicoa, whose exhibition has been next door at Parasol Unit, also considers the links between decay in the physical world to change in society in her exhibition ‘Paints a Picture’. While outside in the garden all is calm, with a hammock in which to […]
One of the top universities in the world, with a history going back 800 years, one image is of the soaring Gothic architecture of King’s College chapel, its choir and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Christmas. The other is of students having a good time, partying, playing rugby, drinking champagne and punting […]
The area around Old Street in London is awash with building contractors as the character of the area is being changed out of recognition with new developments of various different shapes, sizes and architectural styles (some better than others). Surrounded by these developments is an oasis of calm, a water garden with ducks paddling happily […]
The light filters down from the rooflights through the grid of roughly-hewn old timber beams and joists. This is not the shiny skyscraper architecture of downtown London, nor is it out in the suburbs and, indeed tall new residential blocks are appearing all around. In London, where does downtown start and uptown start? Given its location […]
Villages, towns and cities are created by the spaces – narrow alleys, streets, squares and piazzas – that join the buildings together, in which people can walk, meet, eat, drink and enjoy each other’s company. Lives are also shaped in part by the places which people have travelled through, with memories of the entrance doors, the staircases, […]
"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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