Category Archives: Architecture

‘A brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon’ – the maddening, miraculous Barbican hits 40

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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.

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An inch apart: new troubles for San Francisco’s Millennium Tower

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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.

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Triangle tower: building starts on rare Paris skyscraper decried as ‘catastrophe’

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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.

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‘A vortex of thinking’ – inside the LSE’s brawny, brainy new building

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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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Sycamore stunner: how the House of Hungarian Music swallowed a forest

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Budapest’s £67m new museum doesn’t just nestle among trees – they grow through it. But is Sou Fujimoto’s ravishing creation just another cultural bauble for repressive leader Viktor Orbán?

A great big crumpet appears to have landed in the middle of Budapest’s City Park, its circular hole-studded mass impaled on a thicket of trees. It droops down here and there, revealing little terraces cut into its top, and flares up elsewhere, showing off a sparkling underside of tiny golden leaves.

This surreal sight is the work of Sou Fujimoto, a Japanese architect known for making his models out of piles of crisps, washing-up scourers, or whatever else may be to hand. In this case, it wasn’t a crumpet but a lotus root that inspired this canopy, which now provides an otherworldly home for the capital’s new House of Hungarian Music. In a city that already has a renowned opera house, music academy and numerous concert halls, what could this €80m (£67m) project possibly add?

“We want to show the wonder of music to a younger generation,” says music historian András Batta, managing director of the new centre, which opened on Hungarian Culture Day this weekend. He is standing in the building’s glade-like interior, where oval openings bring light down through the swooping ceiling, and an aperture in the floor gives a glimpse of the exhibition level below. Faceted glass walls enclose a 320-seat concert hall and a small lecture theatre, while a suspended staircase spirals up to a library, cafe and classrooms, housed in the undulating roof. “Budapest has a very rich musical life already,” he adds, “so we didn’t want to repeat what you can get elsewhere. This is not just for high and classical, but ethnic, folk and pop – the really exciting side of music.”

The building is one of the first major elements of the €1bn Liget project, a controversial vision concocted by populist prime minister Viktor Orbán’s rightwing government to transform the Városliget area into a showcase of Hungarian national culture. A €120m Museum of Ethnography is nearing completion nearby, in the form of two gigantic sloping wedges rearing up out of the ground, clad in a strange lacy wrapping that nods to Hungarian national dress.

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Tented love: how Senegal created a spectacular new African architecture

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After independence in 1960, the country cast off western influences and forged a new African style full of triangular forms, rocket-shaped obelisks and rammed earth. Is this spirit now being suffocated? Our writer takes a tour of the capital

Visiting the International Fair of Dakar is like taking a stroll through the ruins of some ancient Toblerone-worshipping civilisation. A cluster of triangular pavilions rises from a podium, each clad in a rich pattern of seashells and pebbles. These are reached by triangular steps that lead past triangular plant pots to momentous triangular entranceways. All around, great hangar-like sheds extend into the distance, ventilated by triangular windows and topped with serrated triangular roofs. All that’s missing is triangular honey from triangular bees.

Built on the outskirts of the Senegalese capital as a showcase for global trade in 1974, this astonishing city-sized hymn to the three-sided shape was designed by young French architects Jean Francois Lamoureux, Jean-Louis Marin and Fernand Bonamy. Their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer the call of Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, for a national style that he curiously termed “asymmetrical parallelism”.

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Sinking feeling: San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is still leaning 3in every year

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The 58-story luxury condominium building continues sinking despite a $100m plan to reinforce its foundation to prevent tilting

San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower – a luxury condominium where star athletes and retired Google employees bought multimillion dollar apartments before they realized it was sinking – is continuing to sink and tilt to the side by about 3in (7.5 cm) per year, according to the engineer responsible for fixing the troubled building.

In a few years, if the tilting continues at the current rate, the 58-story luxury building could reach the point where the elevators and plumbing may no longer operate, said Ron Hamburger, the engineer.

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First, a pickled shark. Next up for Damien Hirst, his ‘white elephant’ manor house

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The artist’s £3m Cotswolds pile, which has remained empty and unrenovated since 2005, has been described as an ‘eyesore’

When Damien Hirst bought a historic manor in the Cotswolds he had grand plans. The crumbling 19th-century Toddington Manor, which the world’s richest artist bought for £3m in 2005, would be restored to its former glory, turned into his family home and be a spectacular gallery for his personal art collection.

But years 17 years after its purchase, the property remains uninhabited and covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Locals have branded it an “eyesore,” a “white blob” and “a blight on the countryside”.

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Richard Rogers: Pompidou and Millennium Dome architect dies aged 88

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The British architect changed the London skyline with creations such as the Millennium Dome and the Cheesegrater

British architect Richard Rogers, known for designing some of the world’s most famous buildings including Paris’ Pompidou Centre, has died aged 88.

Rogers, who changed the London skyline with distinctive creations such as the Millennium Dome and the ‘Cheesegrater’, “passed away quietly” Saturday night, Freud communications agency’s Matthew Freud told the Press Association.

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Neat enough for Pepys: Magdalene college Cambridge’s inventive new library

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The famous diarist’s dedicated building, left to his Cambridge alma mater, could not be altered. So architect Níall McLaughlin created a magical solution

“My delight is in the neatness of everything,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1663, “and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.”

He was referring in part to the fastidious organisation of his magnificent collection of books. By the time of his death in 1703 he had amassed 3,000 of them, which he left to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge, to be housed in a dedicated building with his name above the door. He gave strict instructions that his library be kept intact for posterity, without addition or subtraction, its contents arranged “according to heighth” in the bespoke glass-fronted bookcases he had especially commissioned. The responsibility came with an added threat: if one volume goes missing, he instructed, the whole library must be transferred to Trinity.

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Brooding beauty: why Carmarthenshire is Wales’ best-kept secret

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With its glacial lakes, silky beaches and verdant hills, it’s a wonder this brilliant county for walking is often overlooked

Thank God no boozy poet or philandering painter was born or buried in Llandeilo in the heart of Carmarthenshire. If there were, it would probably be flooded with pilgrims. As it is, the small inland town on the mighty Tywy (or Towy) – the longest river that has its source and outlet in Wales – has a degree of quaintness, but not too much, and only a handful of gawpers admiring the pastel-painted facades. Most are, like me, on road trips, as the A40 which runs through Llandeilo is a greenery-fringed alternative to the busier Heads of the Valleys road just to the south, and there are coffees and buns and bowls of cawl (a local lamb and veg stew) to be had here.

Carmarthenshire – or Sir Gâr – known as the Garden of Wales, is one of the 13 historic counties. Still largely agricultural, it’s criss-crossed by quiet back roads and is where the M4 runs out. It’s one of many places in Wales people pass through without stopping and is something of a Cinderella county.

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‘It’s like a cemetery’: the trend turning San Francisco’s colorful houses ‘gentrification gray’

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More and more, the pastels and gold-leaf embellishments have given way to the contemporary, but unimaginative, tungsten hue

Richard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches children to play in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue at the pavement to a red and yellow sunburst at the ridge, the otherwise modest Spanish-style home is essentially one enormous mural, a crowded portrait of long-gone musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelia, and the odd jungle animal.

Segovia has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district since 1963, and he sees himself as a custodian of the neighborhood’s culture, specifically as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly the 68-year old “Mayor of the Mission” finds himself face to face with a stark representation of all the color that has been bled out of the city over successive waves of tech-fueled gentrification.

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A £300 monsoon-busting home: the Bangladeshi architect fighting extreme weather

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From a mosque that breathes to innovative bamboo houses, Marina Tabassum has won the prestigious Soane medal for her humanitarian buildings

For the people of coastal Bangladesh, the monsoon can bring untold torment – and, occasionally, unexpected joy. Every year from June to October, in the Ganges delta region where the country’s three major rivers converge, the waterways swell and riverbanks burst, causing catastrophic flooding. The torrential rainfall is joined by heavy glacial runoff from the Himalayas, exacerbated in recent years by global heating. Homes and livelihoods are lost overnight. But the meltwater also brings cascades of sediment that, a few months later, leave unpredictable gifts – new strips of land, known as “chars”, rising from the riverbed.


“You can’t really call it land,” says Marina Tabassum, who has been awarded the Soane medal, the first architect from the global south to win the prestigious gong. “It is wetness. It belongs to the river. But for the landless, the chars offer some years of relief. They provide a place to fish, cultivate and settle with their families.”

Tabassum turned her attentions to the delta region last year when the pandemic struck and work in her Dhaka office, MTA, slowed down. It gave her time to pause and reflect, and reassess where the skills of an architect can make the most difference. The national lockdown had caused many to lose their jobs, increasing homelessness in the region, with countless delta-dwellers forced to live under makeshift tarpaulin shelters.

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New York billionaire seeks permission for ‘temple for a titan’

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Investor Bill Ackman trying to win approval for a controversial penthouse overlooking Central Park

The billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman will on Tuesday attempt to convince New York’s powerful Landmarks Preservation Commission to allow him to build a “flying saucer” penthouse on top of a historic apartment building in the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park.

Ackman, a Harvard-educated activist investor who famously made $2.6bn (£2.2bn) profit in a single day betting on the financial impact of coronavirus during the early days of the pandemic, has been engaged in a years-long public relations battle with his merely millionaire neighbours to garner support for his planned Norman Foster-designed two-storey penthouse that has been described as a “temple to a titan”.

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The nocturnal​ ​beauty of the ​urban ​underpass – in pictures

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How did the British fashion photographer Perou end up shooting a book of grimy, deserted underpasses around England? It started, he says, “when Karl Hyde of Underworld asked me to photograph one for his [2013] solo album Edgeland”. Hyde suggested they expand the idea, and the result, eight years later, is Tunnel Vision, featuring more than 200 English underpasses photographed at night, with gnomic captions (supplied by Hyde) taken from graffiti found nearby.

“The more I photographed underpasses the more wonderful I found them,” says Perou. “They’re all unique: they have different designs and lighting, different paint or municipal art on the walls. They’re almost all uniformly smelly and cold,” but, he insists, “beautiful and full of character.”

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Slapstick architecture: how a €3.99 Ikea salad bowl became part of the Rotterdam skyline

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The colossal mirrored bowl of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen costs a fortune to clean and has upset a neighbouring hospital. So how are locals finding it?

Inspiration often strikes at lunch in the office of Dutch architects MVRDV. It’s the one moment in the day when everyone breaks from their screens and comes together around a long communal dining table, spread with assorted salads, to eat and chat. One fateful day in 2013, during a lunchtime brainstorming session, the tableware would prove to be more inspirational than ever. Eight years on, a monumental Ikea salad bowl has been added to the Rotterdam skyline – a €3.99 Blanda Blank rising 40 metres high.

“I was looking for something round,” says Winy Maas, the puckish frontman of MVRDV, describing the origins of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. This €94m (£80m) open archive for the city’s art museum now stands as a colossal mirrored bowl in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, reflecting the surroundings in a surreal panorama. “The interns had put a big rectangular block of Styrofoam on the site model,” Maas recalls. “It was too rude. I thought something round would be nicer to our neighbours, so I replaced it with a mug. Then we wanted to reduce the footprint, so I grabbed the stainless steel bowl, with its nice mirroring aspect. That was it.”

Such is the design process in an office founded on whimsical spectacle. Maas revels in turning models upside down, or grabbing whatever is to hand and adding it to the mix. One project began as a cluster of blocks before he draped a cloth over the model, turning it into a lumpy hill. Another building, with house-sized blocks dramatically cantilevered from its side, was the result of a model of a grid of little towers being mistakenly placed horizontally on the table. The comical process is intrinsic to the practice’s quirky Superdutch brand, and key to their global exportability. (For the Depot launch, a dedicated press conference was held in Chinese.) As architectural slapstick, their work transcends cultural boundaries.

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Herzog & de Meuron: ‘Architecture is the art of facts. We shouldn’t have a moralistic standpoint’

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The Basel-based ‘starchitects’ are at work on highly charged projects in Israel, Hong Kong and the new Cambridge HQ of AstraZeneca. How do they negotiate openness and inclusion?

Next month, a mighty new art museum opens in Hong Kong, billed as the most significant in the continent of Asia, whose waterside facade features a vertical digital screen the size of a football pitch. It does this in the middle of the political storm caused by the Chinese government’s national security law, which threatens to crush the museum’s promises of freedom of expression.

On the outskirts of Cambridge, England, the finishing touches are being applied to the crystalline new headquarters of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company whose Covid vaccine has made it a global household name. In Jerusalem, just across the road from the Israeli parliament building, a new national library is under construction, with the stated aim of serving all the communities and faiths of a violently divided country.

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Mismatch plates and hang art low: 18 ways to create a more beautiful home

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Matt Gibberd, founder of high-end architectural estate agency The Modern House, shares his top tips

For the past 16 years, I have spent my days nosing round other people’s homes like a design-obsessed basset hound. I have been granted access through hundreds of locked doors, perched on wobbly Windsor chairs, and taken tea in stylish studio flats, cleverly converted factories and even a working barge.

Throughout all this, I’ve learned a lot. As The Modern House has grown, I’ve discovered that these homes – from studio flats to listed architectural masterpieces – have the same design principles in common: clever layouts, masterly manipulation of natural light, tactile materials, a connection to nature, sheer exuberance and personality in decoration – and much more.

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As important as the Taj Mahal? The Palestinian refugee camp seeking Unesco world heritage status

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For 70 years, the ramshackle Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem has been a site of displacement. Why is this ‘heritage of exile’ not enough for Unesco to grant it the status it gives Macchu Picchu and Venice?

The Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem doesn’t look much like your usual Unesco world heritage site. For a start, there are no souvenir stalls or swarms of trinket hawkers. Instead, cracked concrete walls covered with Arabic graffiti frame the entrance to a corner shop, where an old photocopier stands next to a few meagre shelves of provisions. A taxi loiters on a potholed street between piles of broken breeze blocks, while electricity cables and phone wires dangle precariously overhead.

But a new exhibition at London’s Mosaic Rooms sets out to argue that this ramshackle site of mass displacement should be considered worthy of the same protected status as Machu Picchu, Venice or the Taj Mahal. “We want to destabilise conventional western notions of heritage,” says Alessandro Petti. “How do you record the heritage of a culture of exile? When world heritage sites can only be nominated by nation states, how do you value the heritage of a stateless population?”

Since 2007, Petti has been working with Sandi Hilal, leading DAAR, the Decolonising Architecture Art Research collective, treading nimbly between the worlds of architecture, politics and development. For the last seven years, they have been working with Palestinian refugees in the Dheisheh camp to compile an unlikely dossier to submit to Unesco, arguing for the location’s “outstanding universal value” as the site of the longest and largest living displacement in the world.

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Isn’t it good, Swedish plywood: the miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper

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Skellefteå has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks. And now it has one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings. We visit Sweden to see what a climate-conscious future looks like

As you come in to land at Skellefteå airport in the far north of Sweden, you are greeted by a wooden air traffic control tower poking up from an endless forest of pine and spruce. After boarding a biogas bus into town, you glide past wooden apartment blocks and wooden schools, cross a wooden road bridge and pass a wooden multistorey car park, before finally reaching the centre, now home to one of the tallest new wooden buildings in the world.

“We are not the wood Taliban,” says Bo Wikström, from Skellefteå’s tourism agency, as he leads a group of visitors on a “wood safari” of its buildings. “Other materials are allowed.” But why build in anything else – when you’re surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forest?

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