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• Stairways to modernist heaven – in pictures

  09-09-2024 08:00
  Architecture obsessive Adam Štěch has photographed the interiors of over 5,000 modern gems around the globe, from hunting lodges to high-rises. Ahead of a new exhibition, he shares his favourite flights of fancy Continue reading...
  
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• How the architect who made modern Brisbane shaped the city’s 2032 Olympics stadium plans

  30-03-2025 16:00
  
  Michael Rayner, who designed city’s skyscrapers, bridges and cultural venues, says new stadium will revitalise ‘rarely used’ parkAs plans for the 2032 Olympic Games were thrown into limbo last year, architect Michael Rayner began to bend the ear of local politicians and Olympics officials about his idea for Victoria Park.Rayner – a prolific designer who has been described as one of the makers of modern Brisbane – proposed Victoria Park as an Olympics precinct in a 2
  
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• Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style review – lidos, Speedos and atomic bombs

  30-03-2025 12:00
  
  Design Museum, London
  Swimming’s deep and shallow ends are granted equal weight in an engaging show that ranges from Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch cossie to South Korea’s female free divers and the explosive naming of the bikiniAt the end of Splash!, the Design Museum’s new exhibition on “a century of swimming and style”, there’s a film about the haenyeo – women on the South Korean island of Jeju who for centuries have been diving for seafood and seaw
  
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• Take the roof off: outside meets inside in a radically artistic Italian home

  30-03-2025 11:00
  
  A creative couple’s house in the Romagna countryside is where sculptural simplicity meets curated eclecticismTucked into the rolling hills between Bertinoro and Cesena, Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba’s home is not just a place to live, it is a testament to the seamless fusion of art, nature and design. For the celebrated sculptor, artist and designer, whose whimsical creations have captivated the design world, this sanctuary is both a refuge and a continuous source of inspiration.&ldqu
  
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• Gold leaf and Gatsby: Brussels lays claim to birth of art deco with year of celebrations

  29-03-2025 12:10
  
  Throughout 2025, the Belgian capital is marking 100 years of the movement with events, exhibitions and film screeningsThe gold leaf around the window and door frames ripples, reflected in the water of the swimming pool. Elegant, spare, pristine, the Villa Empain in south Brussels seems little changed since it was built over 90 years ago.Yet this art deco masterpiece reopened only in 2010 after falling into ruin. Illegal ravers had scrawled on its marble walls and stolen its treasures, from radia
  
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• Fears for Bagan’s towering Buddhist temples after Myanmar earthquake

  28-03-2025 18:10
  
  City is close to Sagaing faultline and monuments were significantly damaged after the last earthquake in 2016Rising through the mist of the forest at dawn, with spires reaching more than 200ft, few sights on earth have impressed travellers like the temples and pagodas of Bagan. “Jerusalem, Rome, Kiev, Benares,” wrote the Scottish journalist and colonial administrator James George Scott in 1910, “none of them can boast the multitude of temples, and the lavishness of design and o
  
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• ‘No more velvet rope’: how New York’s beloved Frick museum opened up – and will now even sell coffee

  25-03-2025 16:11
  
  It is a Gilded Age gem full of Old Masters, from Vermeer to Holbein. Now, after a ravishing $300m revamp, it is even more welcoming. Our writer revels in its silk-clad walls and the freshly trickling fountain of its light-filled sculpture court‘If I could have a pound for every person who’s told me that the Frick is their favourite museum, I’d be able to retire already,” says Axel Rüger, the new director of the New York institution, who has just moved there from lead
  
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• The battle for Glasgow’s Wyndford estate – photo essay

  24-03-2025 13:44
  
  A carbon crime or bright new future? For nearly four years, a fierce debate raged over demolishing the site’s high-rise flatsFor nearly four years, a fierce debate raged over the future of the Wyndford estate in Glasgow, dividing residents and sparking wider national controversy. Was the demolition of its high-rises an environmental travesty or the first step toward much-needed regeneration?The dispute began in November 2021, days after the city hosted the UN climate conference Cop26, at w
  
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• Discovering Jewish Country Houses review – crumbling symbols of staggering success

  24-03-2025 13:17
  Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
  Hélène Binet’s haunted photographs of spectacular country residences built by Jewish people across Europe are filled with the melancholic grandeur of fallen empiresAll things considered, we Jews haven’t done too bad. Not that you need reminding. Every corner of the internet, from Reddit to X, is desperate to point out that Jewish people are apparently in control of the banks, Hollywood, the government and, ahem, art criticism. That&rsquo
  
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• ‘A place you remember for the rest of your life’: why Dutch architects are giving new life to old schools

  23-03-2025 12:00
  The inspiring makeover of a 1960s Utrecht college at less than half the cost of a new building and a third the carbon footprint is among projects in the Netherlands that can teach the UK vital lessons in sustainability‘The greenest building,” to quote a slogan now popular among architects, “is one that is already built.” It sums up the belated realisation that the carbon impact and energy consumption of demolition and new building can be more significant than those of hea
  
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• A temple to extravagance. And that goes for Manchester United’s new stadium, too | Rowan Moore

  22-03-2025 17:00
  
  Could Norman Foster’s £2bn design for the club, which will be seen 25 miles away, turn out to be a case of hubris before ruin? There’s a phenomenon in architectural history whereby great empires build their grandest monuments just before they fall. The Parthenon was completed just before Athens embarked on the devastating Peloponnesian War. Manhattan’s most celebrated skyscrapers went up on the brink of the Great Depression. The British inaugurated the imposing government
  
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• I’m still here, in case you were wondering | Letters

  21-03-2025 19:01
  Birthday blues | Historic sites | The T-word | Mythical posties | Chiffchaff firstAfter more than 30 years of appearing in it, I have to confess I felt a little disappointed to see that I was omitted from your list (Birthdays, print edition, 15 March). I would like to reassure anyone who might care that I’m still here, and 76 this year. By the way, who is Howard Devoto?
  John Duttine
  Worthing, West Sussex• While we marvelled at Amiens Cathedral in France, our son, then eight, commented
  
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• ‘Like a game of black-belt level Jenga’: inside the ancient art of Japanese carpentry

  17-03-2025 13:57
  From the earthquake-defying joints that support a 13th-century temple to the delicacy of sashimono puzzle boxes, a new exhibition shows off the myriad possibilities of this centuries-old craftDo you know your ant’s head from your shell mouth? Or your cogged lap from your scarfed gooseneck? These are just some of the mind-boggling array of timber jointing techniques on display in a new exhibition spotlighting the meticulous craft of Japanese carpentry. The basement gallery of London’s
  
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• New designers to look out for in 2025 – from 3D printed buildings to fuzzy chairs made from agave

  16-03-2025 15:00
  
  The UK’s top creatives have put together a list of makers who put sustainabilityfirst. Using everything from reclaimed rattan and bacteria-dyed fabrics to algorithmic design, these trailblazers are making positive steps forward for people and planetI feel hopeful about the impact of design on the world,” says fashion designer Foday Dumbuya, “It has the power to drive change by addressing social issues, promoting sustainability, and enhancing quality of life.”In September
  
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• ‘They goggled and gawped’: Bahrain gives its pearl-divers a sci-fi wonder – and four ‘filo pastry’ car parks

  14-03-2025 12:05
  The kingdom’s old capital is a world heritage site – and it has now honoured its once-biggest industry with a ‘pearling path’ wending through two miles of architectural marvels. But did its car parks really have to be so lavish?Think of contemporary architecture in the Gulf and you might think of gilded towers rising from the desert, eye-popping “iconic” museums, and artificial islands carved into ever more fanciful shapes. But, sandwiched between the petrodol
  
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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 the British Museum chose Lina Ghotmeh for their grand revamp

  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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• ‘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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