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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
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
There is a great urban legend about Tower Bridge. It goes that in 1967 the American entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch purchased the stone facings of the demolished ‘New’ London Bridge in the belief that he was buying those of its neighbour less than a mile downstream. It’s very easy to see why – the neoclassical […] More
In 2017 Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, a move that can be seen as the beginning of more hopeful times for the country. The following year Eritrea and Ethiopia, its much larger neighbour (from whom it had gained independence in 1993) signed a declaration ending a state of […] More
In his book, The Family Silver, the photographer and writer Michael Collins has published a selection from the thousands of colour slides he has collected over three decades. He talks to Fatema Ahmed about looking through other people’s family albums and what these images might tell us about the medium of photography. I’ve always been […] More
Kearsney Court is a late Victorian house just outside Dover in east Kent. Designed in 1899 by Worsfold and Hayward for brewer Alfred Leney, it is a perfectly respectable essay in the Arts and Crafts manner – rough-cast walls, picturesque massing, and large bay windows. Its garden, though, is something else altogether. It cascades down […] More
A generation ago Lina Bo Bardi was not much known outside Brazil, and not much talked about. Today, notably in academia and architecture schools, she is arguably the most referenced and most widely influential architect of her era. Sure, Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were more minimal – but were they so cool as to […] More
