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From the February issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here In 1903, unveiling the first commemorative ‘blue plaque’ to be installed on a house by the London County Council, the Earl of Rosebery, the former prime minister, observed that, ‘great cities gratefully remember those who have honoured them by living in their midst’. It requires […] More
It’s a rich paradox that it was due to lobbying by Mayor Ken Livingstone that the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the London mayor were empowered to take decisions covering strategic planning applications into their own hands. Nowadays, they can supersede the borough (or boroughs) and give final approval or disapproval. Under the GLA Act […] More
The news that a 3D-printed replica of the arch of the Temple of Bel at Palmyra is to be erected in Trafalgar Square and Times Square, New York, in April raises interesting issues. The great Temple of Bel was ostentatiously destroyed by ISIS after they had taken control of the ancient city of Palmyra, and […] More
From the September 2015 issue of Apollo: subscribe here The journey around Sir John Soane’s Museum is a journey through the architect’s life. Now the second floor of No 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields has returned to its domestic plan after more than a century and a half. And so, the self-portrait that Soane (1753–1837) drew up […] More
Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism reviewed From the December issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here On a ‘perfect autumn day’ in 1958, Anthony Wedgwood Benn MP visited a new 14-storey skyscraper of modern flats in Bristol. He saw the flats as the expression of the fruits of a project that merged modernism with […] More
From the January issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.’ This quotation, by the author of Lord of the Rings, is printed as an epigraph at the beginning of the catalogue of the […] More
From the December issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here In the years since the Neues Museum reopened in 2009, the reconstruction job overseen by David Chipperfield Architects has become a reliable symbol for the continuing task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the coming to terms with the past that has been a keynote of post-war German […] More
From the February 2015 issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here If Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) is known outside the German-speaking world, it’s as an architectural prophet. The Gdansk-born writer’s reputation stands on Glass Architecture (1914), a series of surreal, optimistic and apparently ingenuous aphorisms about the benefits of a future environment made entirely of iron, concrete and… […] More
