Top news stories from the world of architecture.
- Court clears way for ‘the Slab’ office block to be built on London’s South Bankby Hayden Vernon on 2024-12-21
Judge dismisses challenge that argued development failed to provide housing and could damage London landmarksThe building of a controversial 25-storey office block nicknamed the Slab on London’s South Bank is to go ahead after the high court upheld a decision by the former communities secretary Michael Gove to approve the development.Mr Justice Mould dismissed a legal challenge by the Save Our South Bank group, which has been fighting the development since planning permission was first submitted in 2021. Continue reading…
- Don’t be fooled. Copenhagen is not that green | Lettersby Guardian Staff on 2024-12-18
Tobias Jespersen says be careful before describing the city as sustainable and a role model. Morten Iversen laments its soulless expansionWhile the urge to write positive stories about solutions to the climate crisis must be strong, and they are needed, Copenhagen should not be one (The five-minute city: inside Denmark’s revolutionary neighbourhood, 10 December). Nordhavn may be a revolutionary neighbourhood, but to say that Copenhagen is a green city is based on false premises.Near Nordhavn, a massive artificial island, Lynetteholmen, is being built that will wreak havoc on the marine environment and lead to massive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, and was approved by dubious means, with only 8% of the city’s population wanting it. Continue reading…
- The best art and architecture of 2024by Guardian Staff on 2024-12-18
Our critics’ highlights include magnificently rough portraits by the late Frank Auerbach, Caravaggio’s final painting and a 1930s silo reborn as a museum of modern artMore on the best culture of 2024 Continue reading…
- Tintin and the terrific tomb: Essex heritage listing is thrill for Hergé fansby Mark Brown on 2024-12-18
Rare stone chest linked to comic-book hero joins church above supermarket under Historic England’s protectionBlistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! Blue blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon! Who knew there was a 300-year-old tomb in Essex that can be linked to Tintin’s boozy best friend Captain Haddock?The little-known tomb of Mary Haddock, in a churchyard in Leigh-on-Sea, has been named as one of the quirkier places given listed status in 2024 by Historic England. Continue reading…
- ‘People should feel there’s more than doom and gloom’: Monument Valley 3’s environmentalist hope-punkby Keza MacDonald on 2024-12-16
How the pandemic and climate migration have influenced this third outing of a formerly sterile architectural puzzle gameArchitectural surrealism is Monument Valley’s signature. Austere, beautiful structures transform and rotate at the player’s touch, creating new paths and staircases for its minimalist characters to traverse. Doorways can lead anywhere. Switches cause columns to rise out of the ground, a perspective shift can reveal a cache of hidden pathways. Since 2014 these games have been smartphone must-plays, one of the best and most elegant examples of satisfying touch-screen puzzlers. But the third in the series, released last week, is a little different.The Moroccan-inspired architecture that made the game famous is still present, but this time your geometric character Noor walks alongside blooming flowers and twisting vines, too. She sails a small boat. She gets lost in fields of bright yellow wheat. And there are many more people around her: she is a lighthouse-keeper’s apprentice, charged with the welfare of her community – which, a few scenes into the game, is ravaged by a flood. In some scenes she is accompanied by someone else, or there is someone there to rescue. It is a game about buildings still, but also a game about rebuilding, together. Continue reading…
- Design highlights 2024: ‘This is sorcery level craft!’by Guardian Staff on 2024-12-16
From nan ornaments to an African pounding table, our panel of creative experts pick their favourite designs from the last 12 monthsChosen by Charlene Prempeh, founder of creative agency A Vibe Called Tech Continue reading…
- ‘It was so fragile, we weren’t certain it wouldn’t collapse’: the architect who sketched Notre Dame’s ancient insidesby Dale Berning Sawa on 2024-12-16
After disaster struck Notre Dame in 2019, Axelle Ponsonnet began to draw parts of the cathedral exposed by the fire, some not seen for centuries. A new book documents what she discoveredWhen Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames in April 2019, architecture student Axelle Ponsonnet was just one of the French capital’s 2.1 million residents to witness a disaster unfolding in her own city. Ponsonnet had no inkling that a year later, she would be joining the workforce tasked with rebuilding the cathedral.Emmanuel Macron had promised Notre Dame would reopen within five years. The roof – with its charpente (wooden structure), lead covering and flèche (spire) – had collapsed entirely; there were several holes in the ribbed vaults beneath and widespread lead pollution throughout the site. Ponsonnet was hired in 2020 as a junior architect to work on the team rebuilding the roof. “The cathedral was still completely charred and open to the elements, the rain falling inside,” she says. “We weren’t certain more of it wouldn’t collapse, it was so fragile.” Continue reading…
- Finding beauty in Brutalism: a flat in Milan provides a haven for creativityby Scarlett Conlon on 2024-12-15
Art defines the space in an apartment in an iconic building whose Brutalist architecture once led to protestsSome people buy their dream home for the location, others for the space it affords them; for Italian fashion designer Massimo Giorgetti, it was a love affair with Brutalism.His one-bedroom Milan apartment is housed in the former L’Istituto Mobiliare Italiano residential complex in the city’s Porta Romana district. Externally untouched since it was finished in 1966, this celebrated Brutalist masterpiece came with a few caveats – namely its single-glazed windows set in iron frames, that don’t open, making it more than a little chilly in winter and a greenhouse when temperatures soar. “You have to really love this building to live in this apartment,” laughs Giorgetti, joking that he needs to wear a hat and scarf in bed during winter and still wakes up with a frozen face. Continue reading…
- Now Notre Dame reverberates with light: it’s impossible not to be movedby Rowan Moore on 2024-12-15
An extraordinary restoration has swept away the lead dust and made the cathedral vivid, but thankfully not kitsch. Our architecture critic takes a look inside“This cathedral is a happy metaphor of what a nation is and what the world should be,” said President Macron. Yet, in an obvious mismatch, the unity and harmony of the restored Notre Dame de Paris, the collective achievement of thousands of craftspeople, builders, firefighters, engineers, architects, clergy, funders and administrators, is as different as could be from the fractious state of politics in France, whose most recent prime minister resigned in the week before the cathedral’s reopening.What is true is that the achievement of the restoration, more or less within the five-year span improbably promised by Macron amid the still-cooling embers of the 2019 fire, is an example of a French ability to get grands projets done, when they put their mind to it, with ruthless efficiency. It’s of a piece with the country’s extensive TGV train network, or the confident way in which past governments scattered crystalline modernity – the Louvre pyramid, the Pompidou Centre, the Eiffel Tower – around the venerable fabric of Paris. Something to do, maybe, with centralised power, the authority of the president, a history with a Sun King and emperors. Continue reading…
- Restore, destroy or leave to rot? Battle lines drawn over west Africa’s architectural heritageby Eromo Egbejule in Lomé on 2024-12-14
Uncompleted or abandoned buildings are a regular feature of the landscape. Now calls for restorations are increasingBeneath mango trees in the lush garden of the Palais de Lomé, an oceanside estate in the Togolese capital, dozens of students from the African School of Architecture and Urban Planning (EAMAU) were taking sessions on archiving.Established in 1905, the palace housed German, French and British colonial governors in succession and then the Togolese presidency before falling into disuse in the 1990s. After a five-year restoration project, its doors were opened to the public in 2019. Continue reading…
- Shard to share title of tallest building in UK as new skyscraper gets green lightby Guardian staff on 2024-12-13
The new building, 1 Undershaft, will be 309.6m tall, matching the height of the Shard to the centimetreThe Shard is going to have to share its title of the UK’s tallest building after planning permission was granted for a new skyscraper in the City of London.When it is completed early next decade, 1 Undershaft will be 309.6 metres tall, matching the height of the Shard to the centimetre, the maximum allowed due to civil aviation rules. Continue reading…
- ‘They wouldn’t do this to Shakespeare’: the pioneers of postmodern architecture, as seen by their sonby Oliver Wainwright on 2024-12-11
Jim Venturi’s new film follows his parents Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, bringing scrappy wit and colour to chilly modernism as they battle the establishment and wind-up traditionalists at the National GalleryWhen Denise Scott Brown visited Las Vegas for the first time in the 1960s, she was overwhelmed with emotions. But she wasn’t quite sure which ones. “The first thing I felt was a kind of shiver,” she recalls in a new documentary. “Was it horror or was it pleasure?” She was intoxicated by the frenzy of neon signs that “reach out and hit you as you travel down the highway”, and exhilarated by the overload of pure “communication without architecture”. Was there something there, she wondered, that architects could learn from?Half a century later, we find her back in Vegas, walking around a graveyard of neon signs in a dusty lot with her husband Robert Venturi. Together the duo changed the course of modern architecture, championing everyday popular taste and the “ugly ordinary” over the rarefied, bleached white world of modernism. They brought back wit, colour and meaning, and embraced messy diversity over the bland homogeneity of so much of the built environment. And Sin City was the cradle of their inspiration – proselytised in their seminal 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas. Continue reading…
- Bob Carr is up for a debate: can Australia treasure its historic buildings without romanticising them?by Kelly Burke on 2024-12-11
The former premier is on a new quest for civic literacy and fair representations of the past as he becomes chair of Museums of History NSWFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAfter years in the public eye, Bob Carr is turning his attention to historic buildings – and he says we should be prepared to have a debate.As New South Wales premier, Carr led the state for more than a decade, serving as its arts minister throughout that time. In July, he was appointed as chair of the federal government’s chief heritage advisory body, the Australian Heritage Council. And last week, he was appointed as chair of Museums of History NSW, the body that oversees the Mint, Hyde Park Barracks, the Justice and Police Museum and the Museum of Sydney, as well as some of Australia’s oldest stately homes, such as Elizabeth Bay House, Vaucluse House and Rouse Hill Estate. Continue reading…
- Brisbane is deciding on a 2032 Olympics stadium: how do the options stack up?by Jack Snape on 2024-12-09
With the river city’s international reputation on the line, a 100-day review period hopes to cut through the political posturing and land on a main venue befitting of the GamesThe 2032 Olympics have for a long time felt far away but it took Gout Gout to show they are just around the corner. The Brisbane teenager’s barely believable 200m national record on Saturday has upped the urgency for organisers to get Games planning right, as Queenslanders dream of an Olympic sprinting medal from a local hero.The venue options for athletics and the opening and closing ceremonies are well-known and the deadlines obvious. But more than three years after Brisbane won the right to host the 2032 Olympics, uneven ambition and political manoeuvring means organisers have not yet decided on the site. Continue reading…
- From brutalist school to space-age church: the architectural oasis deep in Trump countryby Oliver Wainwright on 2024-12-09
Columbus, Indiana, is a mecca of modernism that still embodies the progressive ideals of its founders and star designers. Our writer explores ‘the Athens of the prairie’Imagine growing up in a place where every stage of your life was framed by the best architecture of its day. You start out in an experimental elementary school, learning on a multi-level landscape of open-plan terraces connected by slides, before moving to a junior school where little towers of classrooms are linked by brightly coloured sloping tunnels. You spend your high school years in a heroic piece of brutalism, attend university in a sleek glass temple and go to church in a space-age tipi.Your libraries, banks and even the local discount store are all the work of notable architects, and if your house is ever set ablaze, firefighters will come from a famous fire station, designed by a Pritzker prize winner. If you end up in jail, rest assured you will be incarcerated in a work of high postmodernism. And you may even die in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired hospital, then have your ashes scattered in the shadow of an Eero Saarinen-designed chapel. Continue reading…
- Notre Dame rises from the ashes at last: world leaders join embattled Macron for grand reopeningby Kim Willsher in Paris on 2024-12-07
Ceremony gives French president moment of glory in company of Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he delivers on promise to restore cathedral It was like stepping back into a medieval age and reliving the breathtaking awe Notre Dame cathedral would have inspired in the 14th century when the light from the rose windows threw a kaleidoscope of colours on its pale creamy walls before hundreds of years of liturgical smoke and city pollution blackened them.This is how the church would have appeared on completion in 1345, towering over Paris, then a city of 200,000 people, from the Île de la Cité in the middle of the River Seine that bisects the French capital. Continue reading…
- Notre Dame review – glorious resurrection is as close to time travel as it getsby Oliver Wainwright on 2024-12-06
Five years since it was gutted by fire, the soul of Paris is about to reopen its doors. Our critic is wowed by the buttery stonework, gleaming lead and gawp-inducing gildingWith France plunged into political turmoil, and president Emmanuel Macron’s approval ratings at an all time low, the country might be thankful to have a distraction of epic proportions this weekend. All eyes will be on Notre Dame tomorrow, as Paris prepares to unveil the interior of its hallowed cathedral, “the soul of France” finally resurrected following a meticulous five-year, €700m (£582m) restoration.The herculean project has seen 2,000 oak trees gathered from forests across France, hewn into beams with axes and pegged into great trusses by hand using medieval tools. It has witnessed over a thousand cubic metres of limestone being hauled into place, chiselled into leaping arches and gurning gargoyles, as well as 4,000 square metres of lead, rolled, crimped and moulded into ornamental roofing. It has also been the stage for a celebrity wallet-waving spectacle, seeing French luxury goods billionaires racing to outdo each other in the size of their donations – reaching almost €900m (£749m) just two days after the fire, endowing the cathedral with a substantial maintenance kitty for years to come. Continue reading…
- Henry I’s luxurious tower at Corfe Castle reopens to visitors after 378 yearsby Esther Addley on 2024-12-02
A National Trust viewing platform at Corfe Castle offers visitors a glimpse into the king’s royal quarters in DorsetA luxurious suite of “rooms with a view”, built for the son of William the Conquerer but partly destroyed in the English Civil War, has become accessible to visitors for the first time in almost 400 years, thanks to a new viewing platform at one of England’s most dramatically situated castles.The King’s Tower was built in 1107 for William’s son Henry I at Corfe castle, which sits on top of a steep hill on the Purbeck peninsula near Wareham in Dorset. Constructed from gleaming white limestone inside the imposing fortification, the 23-metre tower was Henry’s personal penthouse, built to the highest standards of luxury and including an “appearance door” from which he could be seen by his subjects far below. Continue reading…
- Hawking Building review – the Science Museum’s giant new shed of the weird and wonderfulby Rowan Moore on 2024-12-01
Science and Innovation Park, Wroughton, SwindonOn an old RAF airfield, a no-frills metal barn has been built to house the reserve collections of the London museum and its associates, with 300,000 objects ranging from a 1960s nuclear missile to Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesiserMuseum storage facilities are unseen wonders, dark troves of material in little-publicised locations. They might hold 95% or more of an institution’s collections, with some objects as fascinating and beautiful as those on view, others acquired for long-forgotten reasons, destined to languish on obscure shelves. They offer resources for researchers, content for exhibitions, and refreshed permanent displays and refuge to artefacts with nowhere much else to go. They are necessary backup to the workings of a museum. They are the underwater part of the iceberg, the paddling parts of a swan, the dark side of the moon.Now, three of the country’s most significant reserve collections are being rehoused in new multimillion-pound facilities where, as well as being better cared for, they will be more accessible to the public. This shift has been prompted by a government plan, announced in 2015, to sell Blythe House in west London, an Edwardian baroque office block converted in the 1970s into a store for the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum. The first of these has moved its objects to a new archaeological research collection in Shinfield, near Reading, and the second to the V&A East Storehouse, a “new kind of museum experience”, which will open next year within the former 2012 Olympics media centre in east London. Continue reading…
- What connects Huddersfield’s 1990s football stadium and Notre Dame? Beautyby Rowan Moore on 2024-11-30
From a rail terminal to a high-tech house, modern buildings now eligible for listing are a delight anyone can enjoy – even traditionalists1994 was a vintage year for architecture. The year’s popular and posh classics included a dynamic football stadium (for Huddersfield Town), a stately opera house (at Glyndebourne) and the wiggly greenhouse that was the Eurostar terminal in Waterloo station.As there’s a government rule that says buildings normally have to be 30 years old to be considered for listing, the Twentieth Century Society has come up with a list of 10 from that year that it believes should be officially designated as heritage. Continue reading…