At some point in the future an explorer will cut their way through the undergrowth of a sprawling jungle on the site of Teddington, a few miles to the south-west of the remains of the city of London, and come across what looks like a fragment of an ancient Roman temple. A pair of pale brick […] More
Before modernists such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier staked their claim to being the true stylists of industrial society, a generation of designers all over Europe had made their own attempts to reconcile art and the machine age. Decades before white-painted concrete walls and tubular steel furniture were the rage, art nouveau turned new […] More
In July 1720 – almost 300 years ago – the commissioners of St Martin-in-the-Fields solicited designs from London’s leading architects for a new church in which to worship. The architect that they selected from this highly competitive field was James Gibbs (1682–1754), one of the most exciting and original architects then working in the capital. The […] More
The Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire is one of the most beautiful places in England. Tourists visit it as the ‘Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I suspect many of them are surprised to find these historic industrial attractions embedded within such a lushly Arcadian landscape, in which the River […] More
The Jantar Mantar in Delhi is famous for its 13 astronomical instruments, construction of which began under Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II (1688–1743) of Jaipur in the 1720s, and completed after his death. The park is empty when we visit and the giant triangle known as the Samrat Yantra, or Supreme Instrument, looms out of […] More
Ghost Parking Lot was one of the eeriest, most sinister and most striking pieces of 20th-century land art. The lumpy shapes of automobiles were discernible beneath a gloopy blanket of grey-black asphalt, a landscape of parking – at a shopping mall in Hamden, Connecticut – in which the cars and the surface built for them […] More
While you have to fight your way through crowds in Cambridge to see the gothic splendour of King’s College Chapel, in the countryside around the city you will most likely find the parish churches that served Cambridgeshire’s medieval villages deserted. But – to take one example – the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at […] More
A new and beautifully illustrated book on Henbury Hall by the architectural historian Jeremy Musson, full of wonderful photography, drawings, letters and portraits, raises the old question of the ‘problem’ building, the one that most writers and critics find hard to discuss. For Henbury, near Macclesfield in Cheshire, is the 1980s progeny of Andrea Palladio’s […] More
