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    ‘The buildings come into their own when imagined in drawings’

    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

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    Remembering Ara Güler, the eye of Istanbul

    When Ara Güler, for many the greatest photographer of modern Turkey, died last month at the age of 90, the city he devoted his life to photographing came to a standstill. Thousands of admirers, young and old, gathered to pay respects before the funeral service of a man historians and fellow photographers have called the […] More

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    ‘The Southbank Centre suffers from architectural self-loathing’

    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

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    The novelty and nostalgia of the Victorian seaside pier

    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

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    Remembering Robert Venturi – reluctant pioneer of postmodernism

    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

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    A welcome reappraisal of Peter Hujar

    Peter Hujar is one of those artists who remained relatively unknown to the larger art world in his own lifetime yet achieved much recognition from other artists of his generation – among his better-known peers are Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (with whom Hujar shared an intense relationship). His reputation has, however, grown […] More

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    ‘It is a strange little science-fiction period in the history of photography’ – Wim Wenders on his Polaroids

    The German film-maker was a prolific photographer in the 1970s and ’80s – he claims to have taken more than 12,000 photographs – often on location and sometimes of his cast and crew. In recent years he has recovered some of the Polaroids he gave away to friends, and scanned, reprinted and exhibited them. I […] More