Architecture news

• Islamesque by Diana Darke review – the diverse roots of medieval architecture

  08-01-2025 08:30
  
  A beautifully-illustrated account of the Middle Eastern influence on Europe’s great buildingsFrom Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved c
  
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• Design news: a vertical forest, cat robots and Midlands craft

  27-01-2025 16:06
  The profound documentary on building, a celebration of Milan’s Bosco Verticale and a Czech museum dedicated to MuchaThis month’s news celebrates heat-sensitive tongues, forests in the air and the mind-blowing potential of stone. Everything you need to know about design this month. Continue reading...
  
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• A wholesome escape from the housing crisis: the Facebook group dedicated to retro Australian homes

  27-01-2025 15:00
  
  I’m obsessed with the fantasy of fixing up a midcentury house – and furious at the people who’ve painted them white See more from our column Internet wormhole, where writers share their favourite corner of the internetThere is one thing that unites the members of my favourite Facebook group: a shared hatred of white paint.In the comments, people moan about mid-century homes being visited by “the white fairy”. Some discuss whether it’s possible to undo the horr
  
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• Away with Anthony Burke: ‘We did yoga twice a day and listened to the monkeys and elephants at night’

  26-01-2025 15:00
  
  In Guardian Australia’s weekly interview about travel, the Grand Designs Australia host reveals why he always packs a sketchbook, and welcomes things ‘not working out’Read more Away with interviewsMore summer essentialsWhichever destination he’s travelling to, Anthony Burke makes a point of seeking out the best local architecture. As the host of Grand Designs Australia and an architecture professor at University of Technology Sydney, it’s a holiday ritual he says is
  
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• ‘A slice of 1970s Babylon restored’: living the office dream at the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke

  26-01-2025 12:00
  
  With its lush terraces, themed gardens and calm interiors, this trailblazing office building by Arup Architects has been treated to a subtle £32m makeover that still has wellness at its heart“Wellness” is all the rage at the fancier end of modern office development. Anxious to entice valuable employees away from the comforts of working from home, or from defecting to rivals, companies offer them spas, gyms and views of greenery. Proposals for gigantic office blocks in the City
  
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• The Brutalist review – Brady Corbet’s audacious architecture drama is a monumental achievement

  26-01-2025 09:00
  
  The director’s Adrien Brody-starring tale of a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor building a new future in the US moves him into the big leagueBold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It&
  
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• Brutal honesty about Preston bus station | Letters

  24-01-2025 18:41
  
  Bus station blues | Sharp pencils | Peanut butter | Prince Harry | Meat-free chilliIn your print edition, Oliver Wainwright describes Preston bus station, opened in 1969, as “a gleaming monument to the days when bus travel was as thrilling as space flight” (Four of Britain’s brutalist gems, 18 January). Clearly he never had to wait for hours back then in that soulless, draughty hangar of misery, on a cold, dark, rainy Monday evening in November, for the Ribble bus that nev
  
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• Brasil! Brasil! review – no fun and no funk in this baffling morass of mediocrity

  24-01-2025 11:53
  
  Royal Academy, London
  Brazil produces incredible artists, too few of whom appear in this deluded show, which sadly fails to live up to its own hyperbolic guffWhat words would you use to describe the design of this exhibition of Brazilian modernist art? “Chic bombast” perhaps. The biggest room in the main galleries of Burlington House is painted bold yellow with the names of its two featured artists in huge black graphics and, for visitors to sit on, funky curving furniture. But there
  
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• Share pictures and stories of your favourite brutalist buildings

  23-01-2025 12:05
  
  We want to see people’s most loved brutalist buildings around the world and why people treasure themThe Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s film about a fictional modernist architect in postwar America, has become a hotly anticipated film release.Architecture experts hope the movie will renew interest in brutalist heritage. Continue reading...
  
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• Weatherwatch: How living underground can drastically cut energy bills

  23-01-2025 07:00
  Subterranean homes stay cool in summer and warm in winter and can save about 80% in energy costsImagine highly energy-efficient homes that use natural insulation, are resistant to whatever the weather throws at them and blend in with the surrounding landscape, even in areas of outstanding beauty. These are underground homes.The Earth’s temperature below the surface is stable because the ground absorbs and stores large amounts of heat. Just a few dozen centimetres below the surface, the tem
  
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• Landmarks destroyed, masterpieces incinerated, communities razed: how the LA fires ravaged culture

  21-01-2025 13:20
  
  Almost 200 artists in the Altadena neighbourhood have had their homes or studios burned down, while modernist buildings and irreplaceable collections have been destroyedFires are a seasonal recurrence in the dry chaparral region of Los Angeles. Often fanned by the Santa Anas, gales known as the “devil winds,” they spark easily in the long, hot months of summer and autumn. But on 7 January, when those winds blew at 85 mph through areas parched from winter drought, a hurricane of fire
  
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• The lost mansions of Chettinad: festival showcases opulent homes turned heritage hotels

  21-01-2025 07:00
  
  In its heyday, Chettinad in southern India was a thriving hub of international traders. Today, the grandeur of their homes is being restored by a community keen to celebrate the houses’ cultural importance and promote them to touristsThe single-stone granite pillars and Burmese teak beams of Chettinad’s heritage hotels are adorned with strands of marigolds, while the verandas and corridors are hung with small, handmade palm-leaf parrots that sway gracefully among fragrant blooms. Six
  
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• ‘We need people to recognise the urgency’: Peterborough Cathedral faces financial ruin

  20-01-2025 17:00
  
  Its dean has launched an emergency appeal to raise £300k by the end of March as costs climb to over £2m a yearBeneath the breathtaking oak ceiling of Peterborough Cathedral, on which images of kings, saints, bishops and a monkey riding a goat were painted nine centuries ago, the Very Rev Chris Dalliston pondered how to keep this magnificent edifice afloat in the face of financial calamity.Dalliston, the cathedral’s de facto CEO in a dog collar, has done his best to avert the lo
  
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• A sprawling megacity of multi-level madness: why Chongqing in China is my wonder of the world

  20-01-2025 10:00
  
  This megacity is like Hong Kong on steroids – a vertically sprawling, astonishing urban phenomenon that can only be understood in three dimensionsGoogle Maps can be unreliable at the best of times when you’re travelling in China, but in the southern megacity of Chongqing, a map of any kind turns out to be almost entirely useless. Built across a series of impossibly steep mountainsides and vertiginous valleys at the dramatic confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers, it is an aston
  
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• Lights, camera, concrete! How Hollywood is playing a part in brutalism’s redemption

  19-01-2025 12:00
  
  Oscar-tipped film The Brutalist is the latest stage in the cultural rehabilitation of what was once architecture’s most reviled style but is now winning a new generation of admirersThis week an Oscar-tipped film, The Brutalist, opens in Britain. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-plus saga in which Adrien Brody plays the brilliant but tormented fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor struggling to make a life in the postwar US. He’s a sing
  
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• ‘It was built for this’: how design helped spare some homes from the LA wildfires

  17-01-2025 17:00
  
  As fires set LA ablaze, some houses are left standing amid ashes thanks to concrete walls, class A wood – and luckWhen last week’s fires in Los Angeles set parts of the city ablaze, one viral image was of a lone house in Pacific Palisades that was left standing while all of the homes around it were destroyed.Architect Greg Chasen said luck was the main factor in the home’s survival, but the brand-new build had some design features that also helped: a vegetation-free zone around
  
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• Experts hope The Brutalist will revive interest in UK’s modernist buildings

  17-01-2025 16:00
  Architectural historians say success of Brady Corbet’s film could help in fight to protect heritage of divisive style“A mildewed lump of elephant droppings” is how King Charles, then Prince of Wales, described the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth after a visit to one of the UK’s most notable examples of brutalist architecture.His verdict was typical of those who take issue with the modernist architectural movement, characterised by imposing forms of raw concrete, whose buildi
  
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• Citigroup commits to office working with £1bn Canary Wharf tower revamp

  16-01-2025 14:14
  
  US bank will spend almost as much to renovate Citi Tower skyscraper as it paid for site in the first placeThe US bank Citigroup is to spend £1bn to renovate its skyscraper in Canary Wharf, London, the latest firm to signal its commitment to office working.The Wall Street lender will end up spending nearly as much on renovating the 130,000 sq metre (1.4m sq ft) building as it did on buying the site. Many City firms tend to lease their office space, but the bank bought what is now Citi Tower
  
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• ‘Criminally reckless’: why LA’s urban sprawl made wildfires inevitable – and how it should rebuild

  15-01-2025 17:49
  
  A century of foolhardy development, including public subsidies for rebuilding in the firebelt, hugely contributed to this tragedy, writes our architecture critic. LA must rethink – and build upwards not outwards‘Crime don’t climb” is one of the glib mottoes long used by Los Angeles real estate agents to help sell the multimillion dollar homes in the hills that surround the sprawling metropolis. Residents of the lush ridges and winding canyons can rest assured, in their el
  
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• Richard Gibson obituary

  14-01-2025 21:55
  London architect who moved to Shetland and created buildings sympathetic to the islands’ landscape and traditions In 1969 Richard Gibson, who has died aged 89, was appointed deputy county architect in Shetland. Moving with his family from north London to the northernmost islands of the United Kingdom enabled him to keep alive the ideals of modern architecture – in particular that good design should serve the public benefit – long after they went out of fashion elsewhere in the
  
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• Politically historic Kingsley Hall in Bristol awarded £4.7m for renovation

  14-01-2025 06:00
  Building with links to Labour and Tories earmarked for disadvantaged young people wins National Lottery fundingA 319-year-old Grade II-listed building in the heart of Bristol that was the headquarters of the precursor to the modern Labour party has been awarded £4.7m for a major renovation.Kingsley Hall is deeply woven into Bristol’s history and has been witness to various social movements. Continue reading...
  
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• Architecton review – poetic study of humankind’s bricks-and-mortar impact on the Earth

  12-01-2025 13:00
  Victor Kossakovsky’s follow-up to Gunda is a gorgeously shot reverie about our use of materials such as stone and concreteThe granite face of a quarry shatters into boulders, cascading in mesmerising slow motion; a man with a wheelbarrow potters around the Roman ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon; bulldozers and diggers pick over the shattered fragments of a bombed-out Ukrainian housing complex; an Italian architect commissions a stone circle for his garden, hovering fretfully as the landscapers
  
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• Sadler’s Wells East review – all the right moves

  12-01-2025 12:00
  
  East Bank, Stratford, London
  Built in Italian red brick by acclaimed Irish practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, Sadler’s Wells’s vibrant new sister theatre provides six dance studios, elegant auditorium – and a big welcome to allThere’s an idea among some architects that a building should somehow resemble the purposes it serves: that an airport should evoke flight; a democratic building should be transparent; an art museum should look like a piece of sculpture. It doesn&rsq
  
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• Jane Austen’s plates or the woods near her home? I know which I’d rather save | Martha Gill

  11-01-2025 20:30
  
  Why this hierarchy of heritage? Our obsession with buildings and artefacts is blinding us to the value of natureI was struck last week by a story about Alton, a town in Hampshire, where residents have hit on a new basis for object to development in the area: Jane Austen sometimes used to walk there from nearby Chawton. The surrounding landscape, a petition reads, is therefore an important part of our literary heritage and must not be built on.On the one hand, this is a story about nimbyism and t
  
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• Glasgow needs an economy strong enough to sustain its heritage | Letters

  10-01-2025 18:53
  
  It needs to realise its Victorian buildings are an asset rather than a liability, writes Richard Owen; plus a letter from Douglas AndersonI read Libby Brooks’s article (‘Left to rot’: Glasgow’s crumbling heritage comes into focus for 850th anniversary, 2 January) on the bus home from Glasgow city centre, and there was depressingly little in its summary of Glasgow’s architectural woes that I could disagree with.However, Glasgow’s problem with its
  
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• Escape from the terrordome: how Netherlands panopticon prisons are being reborn as stunning arts hubs

  07-01-2025 16:10
  
  They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres – complete with cells for rent and escape roomsOne of the architectural features that marks out the skyline of Haarlem, a small Dutch city, is a 37.6m-high dome, crowning a rotunda. You might assume it was built for religious purposes – until you notice the bars covering its 230 windows.​​Operating as a prison from 1899 until 2016, the Koepelge
  
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• 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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• Tudor psychedelia for £35 a night! Is this rescued Yorkshire pile Britain’s most thrilling holiday let?

  06-01-2025 06:00
  
  It’s got triple-height splendour and 1550s wall paintings likely inspired by Emperor Nero’s villa in Rome. Our writer plays lord of the manor at Calverley Hall – once home to knights, weavers, stonemasons and murderersA ghostly bearded face peers out from the wall of a bedroom, flanked by a pair of winged, snake-like beasts baring their teeth, their necks chained to an ermine roundel. The pattern repeats around the room like psychedelic wallpaper, featuring slithery creatures w
  
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• Office-to-homes conversions: London blocks hold fresh allure since shift to home-working

  05-01-2025 16:37
  
  Interest has surged since relaxation of planning rules last March, but technical difficulties often loom largeOn a busy high street in Balham, south London, stands a boxy, beige-fronted building. Built in the 1940s, for decades the four-storey office block was home to hundreds of civil servants until Department for Work and Pensions officials moved out in 2020.Now, Irene House boasts 77 one- and two-bedroom upmarket apartments with seven more homes inside a roof extension. It still has its art d
  
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• ‘It’s Dungeness first’: panel to decide fate of new Mr Doodle house

  03-01-2025 17:31
  Award-winning architect says planned renovation on behalf of millionaire artist is ‘respectful’ of area’s heritageDungeness, on the Kent coast, has long championed pioneering architecture, welcoming the distinctive black and yellow home of the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman. But a proposal for a house clad in the rusty scrawls of the millionaire artist Mr Doodle has tested the open-mindedness of those who live there – and failed to win over the parish council.Mr Doodl
  
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