Hamish Ogston’s donation will fund up to 2,700 apprenticeships in crafts to preserve historic buildings
A British philanthropist has given almost £29m to heritage skills training, breathing new life into dying crafts and addressing the chronic shortage of specialists who can prevent historic buildings from deteriorating beyond repair.
Hamish Ogston’s donation, which has been made through his charitable foundation, will be announced on Thursday.
Continue reading...Uruguayan-born Viñoly’s sometimes controversial work included more than 600 structures around world
Rafael Viñoly, the Uruguayan-born and New York-based architect known for designing landmark buildings around the world, has died aged 78.
Viñoly’s death on Thursday was announced by his son, Roman, on the website of the family firm, Rafael Viñoly Architects.
Continue reading...Young ‘custodian’ hopes to make ancestral home of Muncaster first carbon-zero castle in UK
In 1990, the year Ewan Frost-Pennington was born, the final bears left Muncaster Castle in the westernmost corner of the Lake District. Winnie, an Asiatic black bear, departed Cumbria for Dudley zoo, along with Inca, her daughter, and her sister, Gretel.
Three decades later, the bear pit has now been covered over with a solar farm. It is the brainchild of Frost-Pennington, the heir to the 800-year-old pink granite fortress, as he tries to make Muncaster the first carbon-zero castle in the UK.
Continue reading...The designer of the glasshouses at Kew Gardens fell out of favour – but supporters of a new museum hope to change all that
One major name is missing from the line-up of great British architects that students learn have shaped the way that Britain looks. And it is a name with quite a ring to it: Decimus Burton.
Now members of the Decimus Burton Society believe they are about to put that right by establishing this Victorian classical revivalist’s place alongside better known titans such as Christopher Wren, John Nash and Edwin Lutyens. A new museum celebrating his achievements is on the drawing board and awaits approval this spring.
Continue reading...National Highways faces third intervention by a local authority over infilling, after burying Congham bridge in Norfolk in tonnes of concrete
A controversial practice by the government’s roads agency of burying historic railway bridges in concrete has been dealt a fresh blow after a third council intervened over another infilled structure.
King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council has told National Highways it must apply for retrospective planning permission if it wants to retain hundreds of tonnes of aggregate and concrete it used to submerge Congham bridge, a few miles east of King’s Lynn.
Continue reading...Journalist touring residence with new first lady is shown torn sofas, broken windows and art damaged by the sun
Jair Bolsonaro’s wrecking of the Amazon made him a global outcast – but his acts of desecration were not limited to the rainforest.
A report by the Brazilian broadcaster GloboNews suggests that even the official presidential residence – a 1950s masterpiece by the architect Oscar Niemeyer – was defiled by the far-right politician during his four years in power.
Continue reading...One of Tokyo’s most famous buildings was dismantled in April due to asbestos fears. Now 23 of the capsules have been saved for posterity
Tatsuyuki Maeda had more reason than most to feel a pang of regret as he joined admirers and passing office workers to watch Nakagin Capsule Tower being dismantled.
The building was not just one of Tokyo’s most famous structures; for more than a decade it had been Maeda’s occasional home – a pied-à-terre in the heart of the city he had coveted since he first set eyes on it from his nearby workplace.
Continue reading...Labour government received bid to relocate controversial London building before it was rebranded as the O2
The “Swindon Dome” does have a ring to it.
It has emerged Tony Blair’s government received a proposition to move the Millennium Dome – later redeveloped and rebranded as the O2 – to Swindon.
Continue reading...Pritzker prize winner who combined Asian and western influences said postwar ruins of Japan stayed with him in his work
Pritzker-winning Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, known for his avant garde style and category-defying works, has died at the age of 91, his office says.
Isozaki died of old age at his home in Okinawa on Wednesday, with the funeral to be attended only by his close family, the office said in a statement on Friday.
Continue reading...The heritage building’s floor will become an indoor beach for an award-winning opera – one of a few architectural landmarks that will get a new life this summer
Twenty-six tonnes of sand will be shipped into Sydney town hall as part of the 2023 Sydney festival, with the heritage-listed building transformed into a faux beach for an award-winning opera starring 79 people and a dog.
The program for the annual festival, announced today, will amplify stories from Indigenous and female-identifying creatives next year. Led by artistic director Olivia Ansell for the second time, it will champion climate action, marginalised voices and the rediscovery of underused spaces in the city – including Harry Seidler’s mushroom-shaped building in Martin Place, which will be turned into a 1970s-themed bar and live music hub, with audiences invited to stay in the retro hotel rooms above.
Continue reading...Begun in 1929, the building was a collaboration between architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott
Battersea power station was built in two phases, as a collaboration between the architects Theo Halliday and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
Halliday was responsible for the overall shape and the interior.
Continue reading...The Trust’s state conservation director wrote letters to the public and organisations citing concerns over the plan’s scale and impact
The National Trust has criticised the New South Wales government’s plan to revamp and reimagine Sydney’s Central station, claiming that the scheme “presents a genuine and very real threat to Australia’s greatest station”.
The trust’s NSW conservation director, David Burdon, wrote to members of the public and organisations for “help in saving the iconic Sydney Central station”, citing concerns over the scale and impact of the plan that would build over a portion of the heritage-listed site.
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Continue reading...The Line – due to be just 200 metres wide – will make Neom world’s most liveable city ‘by far’, officials claim
The promotional material is striking: two mirror-encased skyscrapers stretching more than 100 miles across a swathe of desert and mountain terrain, providing a future home for 9 million people. Is it the ultimate in high-density living, or a grandiose science fiction fantasy?
In short, economists, architects and analysts are not quite sure. So extravagant is Saudi Arabia’s plan to create an urban utopia that even those working on the project, known as the Line, do not yet know if its scale and scope can ever be realised.
Continue reading...In need of repair, futuristic yet surreal complex built by artist Xavier Corberó is to become public space
Like a three-dimensional De Chirico painting or an Escher staircase to nowhere, the labyrinthine Espai Corberó near Barcelona defies architectural logic, being designed “without plans, obeying only space and poetry”.
“It’s not my home, it’s a place I made with the help of patrons and buyers as a home for my sculptures,” the artist Xavier Corberó told the art magazine AD shortly before his death at 81 in 2017.
Continue reading...Bas Smets’ project, featuring trees and a cooling system, aims to create a more pedestrian-friendly space around Paris landmark
For most of the last year, the Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets could be found walking purposefully around the Île de la Cité in central Paris staring at and thinking about Notre Dame Cathedral.
On a blazing hot day in the French capital he is back there, pointing at the landmark, still shrouded in scaffolding after it was ravaged by a devastating fire in April 2019.
Continue reading...Water shortages leading to rising salt concentrations and sandstorms are eroding world’s ancient sites
Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.
Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.
Continue reading...Conceived as a utopian city within a city, the labyrinthine London landmark had a troubled path on its way to being hailed as an architectural icon. But is this world-class arts centre now in danger of being turned into a shopping mall?
It looks like something from a wildly imaginative sci-fi comic, an impossible vision of worlds slamming into each other in a fantastical collage. Elevated walkways leap across the sky while a trio of towers rise up like serrated blades, their edges sawing at the clouds. Beneath them, fountains cascade and cafes spill across lush waterside terraces, while an art gallery and library jut out overhead. A tropical conservatory wraps around the top of a subterranean theatre, next to a cinema buried beneath a crescent of apartments. And the entire multilayered edifice floats above a 2,000-seat concert hall carved into the ground.
This is no sci-fi comic, but a cutaway diagram of the Barbican arts centre dating from 1982, rendered in vivid orange, red and green. Somehow, this miraculous Escher-like wonder really did get built, and it hits 40 this month, with celebratory events and a handsome new book modestly titled Building Utopia.
Continue reading...Engineer overseeing the luxury tower’s retrofit discovered the space between it and a smaller building had widened by an inch
San Francisco’s troubled Millennium Tower, which has continued to sink despite multimillion dollar efforts to correct it, has developed yet another problem.
The luxury tower, popular among star athletes and retired Google employees before the tilting issues were widely publicized, has sunk 18in since its construction was completed in 2009 and has a 26in tilt at the top. Now, the engineer overseeing the retrofit of the tower has said the movement caused the formation of a one-inch gap between the building and a smaller 12-story adjacent structure.
Continue reading...At 180 metres tall, pyramid-shaped glass and steel skyscraper will be city’s third-highest building
Construction of a 42-floor, pyramid-shaped skyscraper began in Paris on Thursday despite local opposition and objections from environmentalists who have called the project “catastrophic”.
The Triangle Tower (Tour Triangle) will, at 180 metres (590ft), become the city’s third-highest building after the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, and the Montparnasse Tower, which opened in 1973.
Continue reading...A game of squash, a quick Rachmaninov concert, a brew with a view and then back to studying … the £145m Marshall Building has got the lot, says our writer, even its own Old Curiosity Shop
One minute, it’s a shish kebab. The next, it’s a washing machine. A second later, it’s a casserole. Speaking to Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara about their new building, the metaphors come tumbling out in a passionate torrent. The two Irish architects, whose practice Grafton won worldwide recognition in 2020 when it won the prestigious Pritzker prize, can’t contain their excitement about their £145m facility for the London School of Economics, partly because they haven’t had a chance to visit it yet. “The pandemic has really made us understand the meaning of longing,” says Farrell. “Site visits on FaceTime just aren’t the same.”
The longing is over for students and academics, though, who return to face-to-face teaching this term, in a place that truly brings home the benefits of meeting in the real world. The new Marshall Building, which looks out over Lincoln’s Inn Fields like a gleaming white palazzo, houses some of the finest spaces that any London university has to offer.
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