Subterms
Pubs are necessary as well as enjoyable. Many are landmarks, often standing prominently at street corners and sometimes proudly surviving when all else around was swept away. Railway and underground stations – and thus whole districts of London – sometimes take their names: the Angel, Royal Oak, the Elephant and Castle, while Norwood Junction began […] More
From the July/August issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here Industry never came, but houses and neighbourhoods were destroyed I was born in Calcutta, but we moved from that city to Bombay in early 1964. The company my father worked for had relocated its head office in the face of growing labour unrest; the move […] More
The French architecture firm Moreau Kusunoki Architects has won the competition to design the Guggenheim Helsinki, seeing off five other finalists from a total of 1715 original submissions. The firm’s design, which sets out a series of nine low pavilions around a squat lighthouse-like tower of charred timber, was praised by the jury as a place […] More
Charles Correa, who was widely acknowledged as India’s pre-eminent architect, has died at the age of 84. In recent years, his commissions have included such grand projects as the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon (2010) and the Ismaili Centre in Toronto (2014), and he is perhaps best known for the British Council building in […] More
From the June issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here One of the bloodiest battles in European history was fought 200 years ago, on 18 June. If you visit the site today, near the village of Waterloo to the south of Brussels, there is little tangible evidence that Great Britain was on the winning side, or […] More
Ruth Scurr’s entrancing new book, John Aubrey, My Own Life, stitches together fragments of the 17th-century antiquary’s own writing, to create a patchwork diary or autobiography that reads as if it had been composed by the man himself. Aubrey emerges from the book in a moving and vivid portrait. He was learned, compulsively curious, gregarious, […] More
This year’s Turner Prize shortlist includes the artists Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers – and Assemble, an architectural collective of 18 under-30-somethings nominated for Granby Four Streets, a project to reclaim and renovate a number of apartments in Toxteth, Liverpool. In the usual flurry of hastily composed reactions, the typical critique – ‘How […] More
It is surely right that so comparatively soon after this devastating earthquake the world’s attention remains focused on the humanitarian aspect of the disaster. However, there is another cultural aspect to this tragedy that is only just beginning to be properly reported: the damage to the famed architectural and artistic heritage of the Kathmandu Valley […] More
