Head of restoration says removal of fused scaffolding may destroy vaulted ceiling
The French general appointed to oversee the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral has said the iconic building is still at risk of collapse more than six months into the efforts to restore it.
Gen Jean-Louis Georgelin said the cathedral is “not saved yet” and has to undergo a delicate operation to remove fused scaffolding around the spire, destroyed by a devastating fire last April.
Continue reading...The Senakw development aims to ease the city’s chronic housing crisis – and to challenge the mindset that indigeneity and urbanity are incompatible
The scrubby, vacant patch beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver looks at first glance like a typical example of the type of derelict nook common to all cities: 11.7 acres of former railway lands, over which tens of thousands of people drive every day.
This is not any old swath of underused space, however. It’s one of Canada’s smallest First Nations reserves, where dozens of Squamish families once lived. The village was destroyed by provincial authorities more than a century ago.
Continue reading...Bucharest’s notorious Palace of the Parliament bears witness to the folly of dictator shot dead on Christmas Day 1989
Bucharest’s most notorious building sits atop a small hill in the centre of the city, appearing squat despite its 84-metre height, due to its vast length and breadth. The Palace of the Parliament, as it is now called, is a monument to dictatorial folly whose benefactor was executed before he could see it completed.
Christmas Day will mark 30 years since Romania’s communist-era dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was tried and shot dead along with his wife, as the last revolution of 1989 swept through what was perhaps the communist bloc’s most repressive state.
Continue reading...With its rickety rides, fire-breathing dragons and Arthurian castle, the enchanted realms proposed for the Thames Estuary park are little Britain writ large. Will its High Street have a closed down library?
A circular building topped with a union jack dome rises from the trees on the Swanscombe peninsula in Kent. With its flag tightly wrapped around a glass bubble, it looks like a little Brexit capsule, safely sealed off from the free movement and free markets of the outside world.
This is the proposed entrance pavilion to the London Resort, a £3.5bn theme park planned for the Thames estuary. This walled kingdom of themed “lands” would rise from the muddy marshes by 2024, just as Boris Johnson nears the end of this term as PM. The first images of this planned dreamland were unveiled a few days before the election and the project now seems like a fitting metaphor for the result. Why elect a government that would address social welfare, tackle rising homelessness and fix the NHS, when you can build a parallel fantasy world instead?
Continue reading...Experts from Barcelona combined local techniques and materials with the tradition of the Catalan master to build new school
At first sight the school buildings that have sprung up in Thionck Essyl in Senegal resemble a lost work by Antonio Gaudí.
The strikingly-designed school, where classes began in October, is the work of a group of volunteers led by the Barcelona architect David Garcia and his colleague Lluís Morón, who established a foundation to crowdfund the project.
Continue reading...The illustrated city: As rapid development sweeps through Alexandria, architect Mohamed Gohar is trying to document both the past and the present of this ancient Egyptian port city
For a long time I have been attached to the past – or the past is attached to me. Either way, the past of my city, the ancient Egyptian port city of Alexandria, is something I feel incredibly strongly about.
As an architect, I have been deeply impacted by the rapid loss of buildings along with their architectural and historical values. The constant fear that the essence of the city will disappear and that I will lose all traces of my own past here, as well as the pasts of others who have lived in this city over the centuries gave me the urge to start documenting what is still standing before people or time tear it down.
Continue reading...It is one of Earth’s biggest carbon emitters, a place where SUVs roar from manmade islands to malls with ski slopes. Can an architecture triennial in the UAE really teach us how to go green?
A perfectly manicured lawn lines either side of the eight-lane highway leading into the Gulf city of Sharjah. Punctuated by rows of palm trees and pink-blossomed flowerbeds, it is a lush, implausible vision, sustained by a constant mist of sprinklers beneath the scorching sun. Beyond the green ribbon, expansive gated villas sprout from the sand, giving way to mirrored glass towers, leading to a reconstructed “old town”, where air conditioning is pumped into the alleys of an open-air souk.
It’s not hard to see how the United Arab Emirates, of which Sharjah is the third largest city-state after Abu Dhabi and Dubai, is one of the highest emitters of carbon dioxide and consumers of water per capita in the world. It is a place where souped-up SUVs roar from man-made islands to malls with indoor ski slopes, where water is flushed by the gallon into ornamental gardens, where energy is guzzled with end-of-the-world glee, deaf to the pleas of Greta Thunberg. But before you start sneering, this petroleum-fuelled, water-hungry lifestyle is mostly the doing of British and American conglomerates, the result of an Anglo-centric idea of a city imposed on a desert climate that could never sustain it.
Continue reading...Army general rebuked after lashing out at chief architect over cathedral rebuild plans
The French government has rebuked the army general charged with the rebuilding of the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral after he told the chief architect to “shut his mouth”, in a sign of tensions over the cathedral’s future appearance.
Gen Jean-Louis Georgelin lost his cool with Philippe Villeneuve in a dispute over whether to replace the spire, which collapsed in the fire in April, with an exact replica or a modern alternative.
Continue reading...Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence
From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.
Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.
Continue reading...Daxing international, said to be world’s largest single-building terminal, to handle 72m passengers
China has opened a vast, multibillion-dollar airport in the country’s capital, in the run-up to a major political anniversary.
Less than five years after construction began, the 450bn yuan (£50bn) Daxing international airport was officially opened on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
Continue reading...The project earned criticism for its price tag, but it is being seen as a positive sign for the health of New York libraries
Strategically positioned on the bank of the East River, across the water from the United Nations headquarters, New York city has a shimmering new addition to its skylines.
Unusually for such prime real estate set among parkland, panoramic views of Manhattan and convenient transport links, this $40m development in Queens is neither an upscale apartment block, exclusive members club or the offices of a huge corporation.
Continue reading...The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects
Ever since Mexico City was founded on an island in the lake of Texcoco its inhabitants have dreamed of water: containing it, draining it and now retaining it.
Nezahualcoyotl, the illustrious lord of Texcoco, made his name constructing a dyke shielding Mexico City’s Aztec predecessor city of Tenochtitlan from flooding. The gravest threat to Mexico City’s existence came from a five-year flood starting in 1629, almost causing the city to be abandoned. Ironically now its surrounding lake system has been drained, the greatest threat to the city’s existence is probably the rapid decline of its overstressed aquifers.
Continue reading...From a railway run by children in Ljubljana to brutalist monuments in the Balkans, the Nonument Group maps abandoned 20th-century architecture
When he was 14, Ljubljana resident Janko Vrhunc spent every Sunday training to drive a steam locomotive. “We had to sign in, then check all the wagons, check the train, then talk to all the workers,” recalls Vrhunc, now 84. “I asked the train driver: is the fire strong enough? I asked the conductor: did we sell enough tickets to depart? Are the uniforms in order?”
After three months Vrhunc and about 20 other schoolchildren were deemed ready to run the small-gauge Pioneer Railway under adult supervision. “We moved the train from Ljubljana main station,” says Vrhunc. “The train driver stepped aside and let us do it. This is how … one of us fell under the wheels and lost a leg.”
Continue reading...The architect and anti-border wall campaigner Ronald Rael has installed three pink seesaws on the US-Mexico border to allow families on each side to ‘meaningfully connect’ with each other and highlight the bond between the two countries. Rael says the seesaws have turned the wall into a ‘literal fulcrum for US-Mexico relations’
Continue reading...From heaving traffic and dense crowds to car-free and tranquil: that’s the vision for Chandni Chowk. But is it achievable?
The Champs Élysées is one of the most famous streets in the world, but you could say the French were beaten to it by the Mughals. About 15 years before the avenue was laid out in 1667 in Paris, India’s Mughal emperor Shah Jehan built a grand mile-long street in his capital to reflect the glory of the empire at its height.
It ran from Fatehpuri mosque at one end to the colossal Red Fort at the other and was lined with trees, elegant mansions, mosques and gardens. Provisions for the Red Fort, the imperial residence, were carried down the boulevard by elephants, camels and horse-drawn carriages.
Continue reading...The Argentinian-American architect designed some of the world’s tallest buildings
The architect César Pelli, who designed some of the world’s tallest and best-known buildings, has died. He was 92.
Anibal Bellomio, a senior associate architect at Pelli’s studio in Connecticut, confirmed that the Argentinian-born American citizen died peacefully on Friday at his home in New Haven.
Continue reading...You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top
Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.
It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.
Continue reading...From modernist machine-built perfection to a nuclear-proof metropolis buried far underground, our predictions for future cities tell us much about the past
Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk is published by Reaktion Books
Ever since the world’s first recognised skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the 1880s, cities have been in thrall to visions of extraordinary height. Early intimations of the ways in which skyscrapers would transform cities came in the 1910s, with images such as Richard Rummell’s below suggesting a future not only of immensely tall buildings but also of multilayered streets, railways and flying machines.
Continue reading...During the 2022 World Cup, all eyes will be on the coastal metropolis located 16km from Doha
Text and photography by Stéphanie Buret
From the sands of the Qatari coast rise the towering glass, steel and concrete forms of Lusail, a city being built almost entirely from scratch. Pharaonic in its scale and ambition, the under-construction metropolis is the vision of the country’s former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, born in part from the desire to diversify the Qatari economy and distance it from oil dependence.
Financed by the government via the Qatari Diar real estate company, the city was initially conceived in 2005 but development truly took off when Qatar was announced as the host of the 2022 World Cup.
Continue reading...Four decades ago Egypt embarked on the most ambitious new cities building programme in the world. Their boom shows no sign of stopping
Seen from space, Egypt is a vast dusty land with a green Y opening into the Mediterranean Sea – a fertile valley that makes up 5% of the country yet is home to 95% of the population.
This pattern of human occupation had characterised the country for thousands of years, but in the 1970s, as ever more precious green land was eaten up by urban growth, an idea that had been taking shape in the national consciousness for decades was finally put into policy. Egypt would “conquer the desert” and redistribute its burgeoning population across the white sands of the Sahara – an Egyptian version of the 19th-century US “manifest destiny” to move west, no matter how punishing the consequences.
Continue reading...