Cities have long sought to preserve historic views of landmarks or mountainous horizons. Architect Tom Brigden maps out protected ‘viewing corridors’ in cities from London to Vancouver
Value in the View is published by Riba
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Emmanuel Macron plays down diplomatic spat with Italy
French president seeks to overcome ‘misunderstanding’ during appearance on Italian TV
Emmanuel Macron has said that the recent diplomatic clashes between Italy and France were “not serious” and needed to be surmounted for the greater good of Europe.
In an interview on Fabio Fazio’s talkshow on the Italian television channel Rai 1, the French president also warned against nationalism, arguing that “we need a strong Europe”.
Continue reading...Forget tango: the murga of Buenos Aires is a riot of sequins and salvation
Freelance photographer Kate Stanworth has been following a Buenos Aires murga group for 10 years, as they perform in an energetic street carnival that is little known beyond Argentina
Argentina’s charismatic capital, Buenos Aires, might be more famous for tango, steak and football than colourful carnival parades. However, murga – a feisty, home-grown form of street dance and percussion performed during carnival season, once unfairly thought of as only performed by drop-outs and drunks – has flourished in recent years, providing a source of pride, happiness and salvation for the predominantly working class families that dedicate their lives to it.
Continue reading...Brutalist buildings under threat – in pictures
Brutalist masterpieces (or eyesores, depending on your point of view) face the wrecking ball in cities around the world
Continue reading...National Geographic Traveller UK: photo competition – 2019 winners
Winning and shortlisted images from the magazine’s annual competition, with categories for Cities, People, Food, Nature and Portfolio
Continue reading...A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses
The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long
“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”
While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.
Continue reading...Frank Gehry at 90: ‘I love working. I love working things out’
He didn’t hit his stride till he was 50, and now the architect, as inventive and bold as ever, hangs out with everyone from Harrison Ford to Jay-Z
I’ve taken up flying,” says Frank Gehry, aged 89 years and 11 months, as he sits opposite me in his Los Angeles office, “a little bit.” Then he tells a story. How in his youth he had a job washing aeroplanes, and how his cousin had a Waco biplane and would take him up in it. How he wanted to do this again. How the subject came up when Sydney Pollack was making the 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry. How the architect asked the film director, did he know someone who had a Waco?
“Yes, he did – Harrison Ford. And I knew Harrison way, way back, when he was a cabinet maker. He bid for some of our projects.” But Gehry never got to fly with the man who played Han Solo. Then, one evening, he was at a dinner party complaining to Ford on the subject when the host chipped in. He had another make of biplane, a Stearman, and was happy to take Gehry into the sky. He shows a photo as proof. “I can’t land it or anything, but he lets me steer it.”
Continue reading...Afrobeat and traffic-choked streets in indestructible Lagos – a cartoon
The city has has endured much through the years, but as cartoonist Tayo Fatunla grew up saying: ‘Eko oni baje’ or ‘Lagos cannot be destroyed’
Continue reading...George Mendonsa, The Kissing Sailor in famous photograph, dies at 95
Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed sailor kissing Greta Friedman in Times Square at the end of the second world war
George Mendonsa, the sailor who was captured in a famous photograph kissing a woman in Times Square amidst celebrations of the end of the second world war, has died. He was 95.
His daughter, Sharon Molleur, told the Providence Journal her father fell and had a seizure early on Sunday at the assisted living facility in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he lived with his wife of 70 years. He died two days before his 96th birthday.
Continue reading...Final days of the ‘Isis caliphate’ – photo essay
Photojournalist Achilleas Zavallis has been in Syria covering the collapse of Islamic State across the region and the resultant displacement of families
For the past week the Syrian Democratic Forces have been trying to defeat the last remnants of Islamic State that fortified themselves in the small town located on the banks of the Euphrates River, near the Iraqi border.
Continue reading...City of stairs: the interconnecting walkways of Hong Kong
Hans Leo Maes captures the bridges and stairways that link up the hilly, population-dense city
Hong Kong is known for its flashing lights, neon signs and high-rise skylines. But the architect and photographer Hans Leo Maes documents an alternative side – the city’s interconnecting staircases and bridges.
“The extreme population density in Hong Kong means [structures] are stacked and linked by stairs, often external and very visible,” Maes says.
Continue reading...Nan Goldin threatens London gallery boycott over £1m gift from Sackler fund
Artist brands planned donation from pharmaceutical family to National Portrait Gallery unethical over OxyContin link
The National Portrait Gallery will be forced to turn down a gift of £1m from members of the multibillionaire Sackler family if it goes ahead with a prestigious new exhibition of the work of US artist Nan Goldin.
The photographer and activist is threatening to boycott the gallery if it accepts the donation from the owners of the American pharmaceutical company that makes the addictive painkiller OxyContin, the Observer has learned.
Continue reading...On board Zimbabwe’s only commuter train – a photo essay
Chugging through townships, maize fields and scrubland as the sun rises, Zimbabwe’s only commuter train is cheap and reliable – two qualities its passengers cherish in a downwards-spiralling economy
Each morning sleepy travellers walk to the tracks and clamber aboard Zimbabwe’s only commuter train as it prepares to leave the Cowdray Park settlement at 6am and embark on its 12-mile (20km) journey into Bulawayo, the country’s second city.
Continue reading...Giant leap for art: Lichfield Cathedral to become ‘lunar landscape’
Installation will transform cathedral floor to mark 50 years since Apollo 11 moon landing
It’s hard to imagine anything less like a lunar landscape than the medieval glories of Lichfield Cathedral. But this summer, an artist will transform its magnificent tiled floor into a representation of the moon’s surface to mark half a century since Neil Armstrong took “one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind”.
The three-spired cathedral in Staffordshire has commissioned the art installation as part of its annual summer show, which this year is called Space, God, the Universe and Everything. Peter Walker, the cathedral’s artist-in-residence, will also use light and sound installations inspired by space and the planets.
Continue reading...Joy of six: the buildings transformed by 3D hexagon murals
Street artist Mr June brings facades to life with his abstract, colourful designs
The Dutch artist David Louf, who goes by Mr June, is the person behind these striking 3D hexagon murals, which have appeared on walls from Berlin to the Bronx.
Louf grew up in Amsterdam immersed in hip-hop and graffiti, and turned to graphic design as an adult. Eight years ago he moved back to street art and now combines his skills to create vibrant, abstract murals on buildings across the world.
Continue reading...‘Each one has a story’: the mundane beauty of NYC’s doors
Instagrammer Jonathan shares his obsession with the city’s doors, from the grand to the graffiti-ridden
It is only natural to feel curious about what goes on behind the imposing, archaic or graffiti-ridden doors of our cities.
Instagrammer Jonathan knows this feeling all too well. For the past year and a half he has been photographing the doors of New York from the grand to the scruffy, presenting a unique view of this well-documented city.
Continue reading...‘I’m petrified’: 10 years on, Black Saturday trauma still haunts
Survivors of the Kinglake bushfire of 7 February 2009, which took 120 lives, talk about their struggle to move on
“Half the town is on medication, and the other half should be.”
That’s bushfire survivor Anne Dixon’s dark-humoured attempt to describe how people from the mountain-top hamlets around Kinglake are coping 10 years on from Black Saturday.
Continue reading...Almaty spills its secrets: lost Soviet art discovered behind wall
Thanks to the Kazakhstan city’s loss of capital status in the 90s, rare mosaics, sgraffiti and other artworks escaped destruction
When Jama Nurkalieva and a small group of colleagues conducted a site survey of a disused Soviet-era panoramic cinema in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, they had no idea what lay behind the internal plasterboard wall that faces out towards the street – until someone spotted a narrow gap.
As the caretaker shined a light into the darkness behind, the group caught a glimpse of a man’s head. Out came the toolbox and the rest of the artwork was slowly revealed: a Soviet-era sgraffito by the graphic artist Eugeny Sidorkin that had been lost and forgotten for decades.
Continue reading...Mauni Amavasya at the Kumbh Mela – in pictures
Monday was Mauni Amavasya, the new moon day and most significant bathing day, particularly if it falls on a Monday. At the Hindu festival pilgrims bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers to cleanse them of sin and liberate them from the cycle of life, death and rebirth
Continue reading...Slavery in Britain: the photographer documenting the streets where people have been held
About 13,000 people are kept in slavery in the UK. Amy Romer’s book The Dark Figure* reveals the terrifying ordinariness of the sites of their captivity
In 2013, a 22-year-old Hungarian woman responded to an online ad for a babysitting job in London and, after a telephone interview, was offered the post. When she arrived in Budapest to travel to London, she was met by three men who confiscated her mobile, drove her to Slovakia and forced her on to a coach bound for Manchester.
There was no babysitting job. Instead, the woman had been “bought” for £3,500 by a Pakistani man and was told to prepare for marriage. After being held captive at various Manchester addresses, she finally alerted the police from a house in Cunliffe Street, Chorley, where she was rescued and later repatriated home.
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