Subterms
The Espaces d’Abraxas is a set of social-housing blocks in Marne-la-Vallée, a new town in the Paris suburbs. It is one of several grands ensembles planned in the 1970s by the Communist-led council of Seine-Saint-Denis. Like many of these projects, the Espaces d’Abraxas is built close to an RER station and a shopping mall, but […] More
For centuries, ambitious architects have been dependent on sublime visualisers, from John Soane and Joseph Gandy to Norman Foster and Helmut Jacoby. In ‘Superstructures: The New Architecture 1960–1990’ at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (closed 2 September), the most arresting exhibits – alongside the models – are the renderings, perspectives, exploded sections and […] More
Given the unsuitable proposals its management has put forward in recent years, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Southbank Centre (SBC) is an arts institution suffering from architectural self-loathing. The latest plans have concerned the Royal Festival Hall (RFH), the undisputed jewel in the crown of the South Bank complex. Listed at […] More
Naughty postcards and toffee apples, knees-up songs and double entendres, rollercoasters and gang fights: a trip down the pleasure pier offers up a ragtag bunch of British memories. Gaudy and vulnerable, these spindly old structures are important parts of the island’s cultural memory, artefacts of a form of leisure that seems completely anachronistic in the […] More
Robert Venturi, the American architect who, with his partner Denise Scott Brown, opened the door to postmodernism in the 1960s, has died at the age of 93. In a career that spanned seven decades, Venturi gave voice to what he described as the ‘complexity and contradiction’ inherent in late 20th-century culture and the ‘messy vitality’ […] More
The passing of time tends to mellow architecture, so that buildings that might once have seemed startlingly new or original appear politely respectful to us today. We are no longer shocked, for instance, to see a Palladian building next to a gothic one or an exuberant Victorian extension to an elegantly proportioned Georgian house. The […] More
A public body or institution decides it will embark on an ambitious building programme, perhaps a commemoration of an event in the nation’s history. It earmarks a sum of money from its apparently deep pockets and looks for a suitable project to finance. The idea gets off the ground, with its substantial dowry, but the […] More
For those growing up, as I did, in Glasgow in the 1980s and ’90s, the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) felt omnipresent, a part of the fabric and texture of the city. The stylised rose motif, like a tray of sweet cakes, the impossibly high-backed chairs, and of course the modern typefaces based on […] More
