Architecture news

• Architecton review – immersive and imposing meditation on concrete and stone

  06-01-2025 14:00
  
  Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary offers awesome drone-shot sequences of wrecked and ruined buildings, but could have been constructed more solidlyVictor Kossakovsky is the author of some ambitious and immersively sensory documentaries, including Aquarela from 2018, about the climate crisis, and Gunda from 2020, about the consciousness of animals. Now he has created this monolithic, almost wordless and vehement meditation on concrete and stone; the building materials which are so substantia
  
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• ‘Zippos circus is in town!’ Can Man Utd really raise £2bn for a throbbing big top?

  11-03-2025 18:57
  
  Local lad Norman Foster’s plan envisions an enormous canopy over a new stadium and a ‘mixed-use mini-city’. But, given the club’s £1bn debts, the idea seems as flimsy as its own tensile membrane‘What Manchester does today,” Benjamin Disraeli once proclaimed, “the world does tomorrow.” So begins the breathless promotional video for Manchester United’s proposed £2bn football stadium, summoning the words of the Victorian prime minist
  
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• Outside in: the extraordinary home inside a giant greenhouse in Norway

  09-03-2025 17:00
  An architect has designed a sustainable home inside a glass box, where fruit and veg grow, and their family can thriveSituated on the family farmstead, surrounded by trees and pasture, stands the extraordinary glasshouse where architect Margit Klev and her young family have made their home. Here, Klev has created a house within a house, placing her bespoke building inside a vast glass barn, delivered as a kit from Denmark and erected on site in just two weeks. This glass shell not only protects
  
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• Welcome to Upper Lawn, the 60s Wiltshire retreat of brutalism’s first couple

  09-03-2025 12:00
  
  Pioneering architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s no-frills glass box near the ruins of a grand 18th-century folly was an experiment, a second home and a ‘fairy story’ – all of which awaits whoever buys it next…Upper Lawn is a weekend retreat in Wiltshire built by the late architects Alison and Peter Smithson for themselves and their family and used by them from 1959 to 1982. It’s a place of obvious delight, thanks to a garden enclosed by old stone walls in w
  
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• Streaming: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and the best haunted house films

  08-03-2025 09:00
  The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own rightThe first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh, Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victoria
  
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• When my 70s bar job was a Babychambles | Brief letters

  06-03-2025 19:17
  
  Babycham revival | Wurlitzer wonders | School report | Kant touch thisHannah Crosbie writes about Babycham’s potential revival as though it lived up to its original marketing hype as a sophisticated drink for the ladies (Liquid optimism: why Babycham is ripe for a revival, 28 February). As a barman in the 70s, I remember the frequent orders of triple brandy and Babycham. They were often followed by devastation, and I can remember suggesting to the landlord that, if we stopped serving this
  
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• ‘I aspire to be like water’: the exquisite buildings of Liu Jiakun, winner of architecture’s top prize

  04-03-2025 15:00
  He turns steelworks into parks and makes ‘rebirth bricks’ from earthquake rubble. As the novelist, meditator and ‘accidental architect’ wins the Pritzker prize, we look at the masterful temples, caves and public spaces of this one-man antidote to Chinese bombastPensioners take their evening stroll on an elevated walkway, surrounded by lush thickets of bamboo, as a game of five-a-side football kicks off on a sunken pitch below. Around them, forming a huge C-shaped courtyar
  
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• ‘There’s a poetry to her work’: why Lina Ghotmeh is the right person to remake one-third of the British Museum

  02-03-2025 12:00
  The Beirut-born, Paris-based architect has beaten a list of top candidates to redesign the museum’s Western Range. It will be the latest in a series of compelling creations which ‘get all the senses engaged’The British Museum, behind its purposeful and orderly front, gets more and more complicated the deeper in you go. It has grand spaces – the white stone and shadowless light of the Norman Foster-designed Great Court, the classical halls designed by its original architec
  
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• ‘We cleared rubble with our bare hands’: Iraqis rejoice as shattered Mosul rises from the ruins

  02-03-2025 06:00
  City damaged during occupation by Islamic State group reopens 850-year-old mosque in time for Ramadan as reconstruction gathers paceIn the small courtyard of Sara’s grandmother’s house, children are running and playing as if time had never passed. “The house kept our memories,” Sara says, sitting on the sofa of the courtyard. “It seems like we never left. On the contrary, when we came back, we felt we belonged to this house.”Located in the old Iraqi city of Mo
  
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• Brutalist and modernist homes for sale in England – in pictures

  28-02-2025 08:00
  
  From an apartment in London’s famous Barbican to a penthouse in a former office block in Norwich Continue reading...
  
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• Save our pipe organs – they provided the chest-thumping heavy metal of their day | Letter

  27-02-2025 19:05
  
  Bravo to the musician Mark Mynett for calling out the loss of these instruments as churches close, writes Stephen WilcoxMark Mynett is right – there is a risk that, as churches close and are repurposed, we lose their pipe organs along with them (UK churches need open-mindedness to preserve heritage says heavy metal musician, 23 February).It’s not surprising that a metal musician is calling this out: until the invention of electronic amplification, previous generations who loved loud
  
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• ‘Ambition beyond words’: How Siena’s art revolution brought heaven down to earth

  27-02-2025 14:38
  
  Before the Black Death devastated Siena, the city thrummed with energy, expressed in art and architecture designed to dazzle its audience – and which still astonishes 800 years laterIf you want to know the moment of a medieval Italian city’s greatest prosperity, look at the year it began work on its cathedral. In Siena, the magic year was 1226, the start of some 85 years of construction of the duomo, a remarkable gothic structure with an intricately complex, creamy pink facade and st
  
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• Dear Nasa, please send me to Mars! The photographer who showed Britain – and space – in colour

  25-02-2025 17:08
  
  From ghost trains to backstreet weddings, from demolition sites to ‘alien’s eye views’ of Leeds, groundbreaking photographer Peter Mitchell captures our changing world with his trusty ‘Blad’ – and once even tried to leave itThe Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Pari
  
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• The Brutalist is about a great architect. Columbus is a heartfelt tribute to great architecture

  25-02-2025 15:00
  This critically acclaimed drama about how spaces can haunt and heal us is the finest work of John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson and director Kogonada’s careersGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailBrady Corbet’s Oscar hopeful The Brutalist offers a somewhat skewed depiction of architectural intent, one where public demonstrations of genius and private catharses have an outsized impact on a building’s design. Grand gestures and hidden intentions make for good drama but physical
  
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• Norman Foster on shortlist to design Queen Elizabeth II memorial

  25-02-2025 01:01
  Architect who was once highly critical of King Charles is part of team that is one of five finalists for schemeThe shortlist of teams competing to design a national memorial to the late Queen Elizabeth II has been unveiled and includes an architect once highly critical of King Charles.Five finalists are in the running for what has been described as one of the most significant design initiatives in modern British history, in tribute to the UK’s longest-serving monarch. Continue reading...
  
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• Copper Bottom review – a green marvel in every sense

  23-02-2025 12:00
  Adrian James’s copper-clad, energy-generating new home on the outskirts of Oxford is a triumph of style and sustainabilityWe’re used by now to buildings that declare their greenness; that proudly display their timber construction or hemp panels or wind turbines for the world to see; that make an architectural story out of their care for the atmosphere. And why not. But a striking aspect of Copper Bottom, a new house by the architect Adrian James, is that, apart from being in the most
  
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• ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones

  22-02-2025 08:00
  
  Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientistsAs an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.“Plastic wi
  
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• Organizmo! The Colombian architects overturning colonialist ‘sustainability’ ideas

  21-02-2025 13:20
  
  A 30-acre construction lab is helping reshape Colombia’s architecture with ancestral knowledge and direct ecological action. We head inside their smoking doughnutA curious doughnut-shaped structure rises from an overgrown field on the outskirts of Tenjo, a rural town in central Colombia. It looks like a thatched UFO. Bamboo lattice walls curve up from the ground to form its bulging shell, tapering to a central chimney where wisps of smoke waft into the sky. Through the mesh walls, it is po
  
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• Trump’s mineral grab has all the elements of an earworm | Brief letters

  19-02-2025 18:45
  Trumped by Tom Lehrer | The wrong don | Gulf names | Cork house | DogeYour article, referring to rare earth elements including europium, dysprosium, gadolinium, praseodymium, holmium and ytterbium, was very enlightening (What are Ukraine’s critical minerals – and why does Trump want them?, 17 February). However, it was difficult for me to read, owing to the persistent intrusion of the earworm of a certain song by Tom Lehrer.
  John O’Dwyer
  Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire&bu
  
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• Country diary: Looking under lichen for a stranger’s name | Derek Niemann

  19-02-2025 06:30
  Beckington, Somerset: We’re digging up the past in a rural churchyard, connecting people to their long-lost family membersA “ten-pound pom” left Glasgow for Australia after the war and never saw her family again. My gran’s little sister occupied an empty space for me until last year, when a couple of enterprising women posted a photograph online that they had taken of a tombstone in a Tasmanian cemetery. It would bring me in touch with a second cousin I never knew existed
  
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• Country diary: Looking for names before time takes them away | Derek Niemann

  19-02-2025 06:30
  Beckington, Somerset: We’re digging up the past in a rural churchyard, connecting people to their long-lost family membersA “ten-pound pom” left Glasgow for Australia after the war and never saw her family again. My gran’s little sister occupied an empty space for me until last year, when a couple of enterprising women posted a photograph online that they had taken of a tombstone in a Tasmanian cemetery. It would bring me in touch with a second cousin I never knew existed
  
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• ‘It feels enveloping and calming’: the London house wrapped in cork

  18-02-2025 18:00
  Designer Nina Woodcroft has created an energy-efficient family home that is also a useful conversation starterFor most homeowners a request from a passerby to touch the exterior of their house would probably raise eyebrows. But for the owner of Nina’s House, which is covered with unusual and striking cork insulation panels, it is not only a common occurrence but is welcomed.The conversations may start with curiosity but much of the time lead to lengthy, passionate discussions on how to mak
  
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• Architects warn post-Brexit visa rules hindering recruitment

  18-02-2025 11:38
  
  Firms want review of decision to remove architecture from shortage occupation list and raise salary thresholdArchitecture firms are calling on the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to urgently review the post-Brexit visa salary rules, claiming they are choking an industry that is trying to help meet Labour’s housing targets.They say there were hit by a double recruitment whammy when the rules changed last April, with architecture removed from the shortage occupation list and the minimum salar
  
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• ‘What a project, what a challenge!’: Africa’s leading architect gives Thomas Sankara a proper place of rest

  18-02-2025 06:00
  
  Pritzker prize-winner Francis Kéré has designed a memorial to honour ‘Africa’s Che Guevara’, Burkina Faso’s visionary president who was assassinated in 1987Francis Kéré was the first African architect to win the Pritzker prize when he scooped the “Nobel prize of architecture” in 2022. A native of Gando, a small village in Burkina Faso’s Central-East region, Kéré was once criticised by his neighbours for building
  
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• Soane and Modernism: Make it New review – red phone boxes, Sydney Opera House and a prophet of modern architecture

  16-02-2025 12:00
  
  Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
  The links between Le Corbusier and co and the inspirational architect of Dulwich Picture Gallery and the old Bank of England are explored in a fascinating exhibition in his own house of treasuresIf John Soane had only created the combined house and museum that bears his name in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London – a domestic-scaled pharaoh’s tomb with Alice in Wonderland tricks of scale and perception – his place in history would be assured
  
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• Swing time: playgrounds at their most artful – in pictures

  15-02-2025 18:00
  
  “Play and art have a lot more in common than we might think,” writes Emmy Watts, author of a new book highlighting more than 80 brilliantly imaginative play areas around the world, some of them designed by notable artists including Niki de Saint Phalle and Yayoi Kusama. Too often, playgrounds are orderly, enclosed spaces with identikit slides, swings and climbing frames. In The Art of Play, Watts celebrates examples – rocks on wheels in Melbourne, a sprawling multi-level hammoc
  
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• Buying or building a home in Australia? Here are the energy efficiency features worth paying for | Peter Mares

  15-02-2025 00:00
  
  As climate change makes heatwaves more dangerous, here’s how homeowners can mitigate extreme heatChange by Degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprintGot a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at [email protected] the summer sun hits the west-facing windows of our 20th floor apartment in Melbourne, my resistance to switching on the air-con soon wilts.This generally happens
  
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• Artists decry ‘irresponsible’ plans to demolish brutalist Midlands tower

  09-02-2025 14:00
  Conservation groups say University of Wolverhampton’s proposals overlook historical significance of art schoolArtists and conservation groups have decried the “irresponsible” plan to tear down a brutalist arts tower at a Midlands university, saying the proposed redevelopment is overlooking the “massive historical significance” of the structure.The University of Wolverhampton has earmarked the nine-storey School of Art, which is also known as the George Wallis buildi
  
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• Highgate Newtown Community Centre review – if you’re looking for design that humanises, here it is

  09-02-2025 12:00
  Highgate, London
  An old Territorial Army hall has been transformed into an inspiring mixed-used development – workshops, social hub, sports pitch, refugee accommodation – that’s more than the sum of its partsI recently heard the designer Thomas Heatherwick talk about his ongoing project to “humanise” our physical environment. The event was under the Chatham House rule, but I don’t think it would betray any confidences to report that he called for care, craft a
  
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• Praised, then razed: why is UK’s best building of 1996 being demolished?

  08-02-2025 17:00
  
  The Centenary Building in Salford was described as ‘dynamic and sophisticated’ when it won the first Stirling prize. Now it is to be knocked down as part of a huge developmentRowan Moore’s viewWhen judges awarded Salford’s Centenary Building the inaugural Stirling prize in 1996, they declared it “a dynamic, modern and sophisticated exercise in steel, glass and concrete”.The recognition as Britain’s best new building from the Royal Institute of British Ar
  
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