Digging deep: the reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
They are very keen, the Dutch museum people, on telling you that their Rijksmuseum – their National Gallery – is about history as much as …
10 Mar 2013
South Bank Revamp
Festival Wing and a prayer: new plans for London’s Southbank cultural centre
Festival Wing and a prayer: new plans for London’s Southbank cultural centre
It has been more than half a century since radical architects at what was then the London County Council designed the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell …
17 Jul 2012
Raw space: Tate Modern's tanks
Tate Modern’s Underworld: The Tanks beneath the lawn
Tate Modern’s Underworld: The Tanks beneath the lawn
Found objects have long had their place in art, most notably since the provocations of Dadaists such as Duchamp with his ‘readymades’. It’s not the …
08 Jul 2012
The Shard
Renzo Piano’s Shard in London. Not bad, but NOT a ‘vertical city’.
Renzo Piano’s Shard in London. Not bad, but NOT a ‘vertical city’.
The Shard. It’s a very tall building in London. Also outside London, on a clear day, given the distance from which you can see it. …
18 Mar 2012
Kings Cross reinvented
Vaulting Ambition: the £547 million King’s Cross station concourse.
Vaulting Ambition: the £547 million King’s Cross station concourse.
What do they call those foam-plastic latticework socks they slip over your bottles of booze at airport duty-frees? Do they even have a name? Well, …
15 Jan 2012
Alain de Botton's boathouse
Le Roi des Belges: the boat that’s a house on top of a London concert hall.
Le Roi des Belges: the boat that’s a house on top of a London concert hall.
Oh, you think. This is a dream, right? You’ve gone up in a lift and there, at the top, at the end of a snaking …
25 Nov 2011
Koolhaas's Rothschild HQ
High tea at Rothschild’s: OMA and the dynastic bank.
High tea at Rothschild’s: OMA and the dynastic bank.
I was late, very late, but that was good. The press tour round OMA’s new headquarters for merchant bank N.M. Rothschild in the financial heart …
11 Jul 2011
Larkin: builder poet
“After this it will be all Danish butter-factories”: Philip Larkin and the architects.
“After this it will be all Danish butter-factories”: Philip Larkin and the architects.
Philip Larkin, who with his small output of determinedly unshowy, unmodernist and intensely evocative verse became the pre-eminent poet of post-war England, was the University …
26 Jun 2011
Zaha on Clyde
Zaha on Clyde: and the new wave of British regional museums.
Zaha on Clyde: and the new wave of British regional museums.
Any new building by Zaha Hadid, the best-known and most successful female architect in history, is an event. I even went to Cincinnati once to …
22 May 2011
Chipperfield's English art museums
The straight and the skewed: Chipperfield’s two new English art museums.
The straight and the skewed: Chipperfield’s two new English art museums.
This is a rare opportunity to compare and contrast two new buildings of the same typology in the same country (north and south), by the …