Architecture in the news

Tennant Creek residents say the hot, overcrowded homes built by government contractors are not fit for purpose, so they’ve drawn up their own plansSign up for the Rural Network email newsletterIt’s hotter inside than out in many of the homes in the remote Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek, where the Warumungu man Jimmy Frank Jupurrurla and his family live. Most lack insulation and guttering. At Drive-in Camp outside town, the homes are tin sheds, disconnected from services since the 2007 intervention but still occupied.The poor housing is making the residents sick, Jupurrurla says: “I worry about the future – will my grandchildren and their kids be living in prison-like houses? Or are we going to start designing homes that allow us to practise our culture?”Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter Continue reading…

My friend Colin Fournier, who has died aged 79, was an architect and planner. His two best known projects were Bernard Tschumi’s vast Parc de la Villette in Paris, which he helped to implement (1984-87), and the Kunsthaus building in Graz, Austria (2003-04), co-designed with Sir Peter Cook.La Villette, one of François Mitterrand’s grands projets, captured a unique tension between grid-like geometry and naturalistic landscaping that concurred with Colin’s way of applying systems theory to planning. The Kunsthaus – which became known as the “friendly alien” – was built to house a contemporary art museum as part of Graz’s status as European cultural capital of the year, and has become the principal architectural landmark of the city. Continue reading…

In the early days of Kamp Studios, Kim Collins and Amy Morgenstern were barely making rent. Now they’re a favorite of interior designers across the countryIf there was a low point in the history of Kamp Studios, it had to have been the day in 2010 when Kim Collins and Amy Morgenstern found themselves lugging every single quarter, dime, nickel and penny they had scrounged up from their apartment to pour into a coin-counting machine at a Brooklyn branch of TD Bank. The women, then partners in both work and life, were barely making rent while trying to keep their plastering business afloat. “We were practically the only customers in the bank and that machine was very, very loud,” Collins says. “It was mortifying.” They used the $117 they collected that day to buy groceries.Plasterwork is famously labor-intensive, messy and physically demanding – but these weren’t the only factors that made getting a foothold in the homebuilding space challenging for Collins and Morgenstern. According to a 2024 survey by the construction workforce management platform Lumber, women make up 10% of the construction industry, and only 4% of on-site workers are women. “With the exception of the interior designer or architect, who are sometimes women, we are usually the only women working on a job site,” says Collins. Continue reading…

From the chalet-style patient ‘cottages’ to the walls designed for scribbling on, Herzog & de Meuron’s Kinderspital is a stylish, healing, child-friendly miracle – and it cost less than UK equivalents‘Hospitals are the ugliest places in the world,” says Jacques Herzog. “They are a product of blind functionalist thinking, while neglecting basic human needs.” The Swiss architect has a point. With their low ceilings, windowless corridors and harsh fluorescent lighting, hospitals can sometimes seem consciously calibrated to make you feel ill, if you didn’t already. Attempts to jolly them up with coloured cladding panels and art commissions do little to distract from the bleak reality of buildings where the human experience – for patients, doctors and visitors alike – is often an afterthought.Herzog insists it doesn’t have to be like this. And he has proof. He is standing in the circular entrance courtyard of his practice’s stunning riposte to the last century of grim healthcare buildings. It is a tranquil space reminiscent of a sylvan spa complex, ringed with sculpted wooden slats and planted with tall trees and ferns, where light bounces off marble sculptures that glisten in the drizzle. A broad gallery deck encircles the floor above, with a touch of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, where bedrooms spill out on to wide, daylit corridors. Entering through revolving pink glass doors, you find a concrete staircase spiralling down into the foyer, curling around a core of colourful neon tubes that look ready to beam you upstairs. Continue reading…

Liverpool mayor Ned Mannoun just shrugs and smiles after his council’s ‘magnificent’ Yellamundie is outshone by $300m Beijing LibraryFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastIt was always going to be competition of David and Goliath proportions.Liverpool’s new public library Yellamundie, in Sydney’s south-west, made international news last month when it became one of four finalists in the annual bid to find the most beautiful new library in the world. Continue reading…

He has had a hand in some of the 21st-century’s most daring structures – including Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno science centre. We meet the Uganda-born engineer, who has just won architecture’s prestigious Soane medalFrom the wayward columns of Will Alsop, to the gravity-defying curves of Zaha Hadid, there has always been someone in the background making architects’ improbable visions stand up. More often than not, in the case of the 21st-century’s most unlikely structures, that person has been Hanif Kara. The Uganda-born engineer has just been announced as the 2024 recipient of the Soane medal, an illustrious gong that has so far been awarded to architects and their theorists, but never before to an engineer. As the mathematical brains that so many have relied on, and a professor who has inspired generations of designers, Kara’s contribution to architecture is eminently worthy of recognition. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without him, many of the most daring buildings of the last two decades wouldn’t exist. Or at least their columns wouldn’t be as slender, their spans as dramatic, their curves as sleek.“I see my role as making architects’ dreams come true,” says Kara. A prodigious enabler, he also describes his job as akin to a therapist, teasing out his collaborators’ intentions and making sense of their ambitions. “But, rather than putting them on the couch, I lie on the couch with them.” He is as much of a co-designer as an engineer, less of a conventional problem-solver than a question re-framer and provocateur. He asks architects why, rather than telling them how. Continue reading…

The US architect designed brutalist buildings vast and small across Asia and America – including his own 27-floor Manhattan apartment. A new exhibition highlights a queer sensibility beneath the crewcutPaul Rudolph, the US’s greatest brutalist, had a career in four overlapping acts. First, starting in the 1950s, he designed private houses, delightful Florida getaways where modernist glassiness was tempered by screens and shutters. In the next decade he designed monumental concrete fortresses, majestic and sometimes monstrous, for universities, corporations and gigantic urban renewal programmes. Then came inward and intricate homes in Manhattan such as the Hirsch house, eventually owned by the fashion designer Halston, where the likes of Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger would go to Studio 54 afterparties, later again bought by Tom Ford for $18m (£13.55m). In the 80s he returned to building at scale, with big-budget commissions for skyscrapers and malls in Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta.His creative journey was quite a switchback, running gamuts of delicacy and force, of interior intimacy and exterior bravura, and of celebrity and condemnation. If you don’t directly know his work, you’ll have experienced his influence. If you see a building of a certain age with roughed-up ribs of concrete, or compositions of exaggerated horizontals and verticals and top-heavy oversailing volumes, a bit of Rudolph likely lies behind them. As chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, he guided a generation of leading architects, including Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The expressive projections and recessions of the latter’s Lloyd’s building owe much to his former teacher. Continue reading…

The architecture professor on homes with more bathrooms than occupants – and how the Sydney metro might renew confidence in the benefits of good designGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailAnthony Burke knows good design. And he knows why it matters. The UTS architecture professor is the host of the ABC’s Grand Designs Australia and has spent a career examining and celebrating the best that design has to offer. So Guardian Australia asked him about his personal bugbears and favourite features in Australian home design, and why it is that so many people got so excited about Sydney’s new train stations.What most annoys you in terms of trends and features of new Australian homes? Continue reading…

A remote makeover during Covid pays off handsomely for an interior designer and her partnerCan you imagine buying a flat without ever actually stepping inside it? And then doing up the entire place – bashing down walls, jettisoning fittings and reshuffling the floorplan – remotely? For most of us the answer would be an emphatic, “Of course not!”Kim Verbist would say otherwise. The Belgian interior designer did all of the above when she embarked on the convention-defying transformation of her Brussels apartment, set on the 11th floor of a Brutalist block designed by architect Jacques Wybauw. Continue reading…

Featuring peacock-shaped padlocks and a holographic Sufi master, a new museum explores the religion’s influence on Western culture – and leaves visitors wondering how the giant begging bowls were installedAmong the most emblematic paraphernalia of the Sufis is their “begging bowl”, known as the kashkul. That’s why nearly a dozen are at the centre of a new museum dedicated to Sufi culture and art, the Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, which has just opened in Chatou, a quiet Parisian suburb on the banks of the Seine.The kashkul is traditionally made from the nutshell of the coco de mer palm, the tree that produces the world’s biggest seed, and what makes it all the more remarkable is that it’s a fruit from Seychelles that historically washed up 4,000km away on Iran’s southern shores. The journey through the ocean made the shells extremely polished, which Sufis took as a symbol of the inner journey and cleansing the soul of all earthly desires. Forget the irony that coco de mer shells are expensive commodities these days, mainly due to their suggestive shape. Continue reading…

The stylish conversion of this two-up two-down shows how investing in an interior designer can end up saving you moneyAs a first-time buyer with no renovation experience, Ed Colston, 32, could have been forgiven for choosing a shiny new-build flat that he could move straight into. However, Colston knew it was in his best interests to play the long game. After moving to London after graduating, he flat-hopped his way around the city for the best part of a decade while saving for a place of his own.“I wanted somewhere in a less busy part of London, with outdoor space that I could put my stamp on,” says Colston. He settled on Brockley, a relatively quiet, leafy suburb in south-east London, but which “has enough going on”. Continue reading…

Joe Sim on reforming prisoners through a compassionate philosophy, Malcolm Fowler on the sensory memories of his prison visits, and Sue Beaumont on the demoralising effect of stepping inside a jailBefore modernising prisons through new architecture, as discussed by Yvonne Jewkes, there are other issues to consider (‘Places to heal, not to harm’: why brutal prison design kills off hope, 24 September). There are examples of places that have radically transformed prisoners that have not relied on architecture.For many prison campaigners, the Barlinnie special unit, before it was closed, was the most important innovation in British prisons in the last 50 years. When I visited the unit, it was located in the former women’s wing of the main prison. So it was not specifically designed by architects for changing prisoners who were pejoratively labelled as the most violent in Scotland. Yet it succeeded, not because of the architecture, but because of its compassionate philosophy that staff and prisoners, working together, practised on a daily basis. Continue reading…

It’s got winding trails, a gushing waterfall, some 7,000 trees – and room inside for 1,500 cars. We explore the astonishing Twin Hills project, which isn’t even the city’s first manmade mountainscapeChina is no stranger to moving mountains. It has levelled hundreds of peaks in Gansu for urban expansion, blasted away hills in Yunnan to build railway stations, and bulldozed bluffs in Hubei for economic development zones. This insatiable lust for terraforming is simply a case of the authorities doing their duty to the Communist party. After all, Chairman Mao was fond of quoting the parable of Yu Gong, a plucky old man who decided to dig up two mountains, stone by stone, that blocked the path from his house, to illustrate the power of perseverance.“Two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people,” Mao told the national congress in 1945, citing the fable. “One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must work unceasingly.” Ever since, officials have dutifully taken him at his word, shovels in hand. Continue reading…

Builders already have the tools needed to build cooler homes for an increasingly hotter worldThe US sweltered under record-breaking heat this year, with new research suggesting that air conditioning is no longer enough to keep homes cool. Spiraling energy demands and costs of indoor cooling now have planners looking to alternative ways to keep buildings cool – some fresh out of the lab, others centuries old.“The amount of buildings we expect to go up in the next couple decades is just staggering,” says Alexi Miller, director of building innovation at the non-profit New Buildings Institute (NBI). “If we build them the way we built them yesterday, we’re going to use a phenomenal amount of energy. There are lots of ways we could be doing this better. It’s not all fancy, emerging technology – there’s some basic stuff we don’t do nearly enough.” Continue reading…

The stylish Populus hotel boasts eco-friendly construction and tree planting for every guest. Is this the hospitality of the future – or hot air?Travelers to Denver, Colorado, will soon have the opportunity to spend the night in what promises to be “the first carbon positive hotel in America”. So say the creators behind Populus, a new 265-room, stylish, yet climate-conscious luxury hotel in the heart of the city.Set to open in mid-October, the building is a striking addition to the city’s skyline – a sleek, three-corner structure built to resemble a grove of aspen trees, with each window shaped like the tree’s iconic “knots”. Its climate claims, too, are equally provocative. The hotel’s creators have promised to overcompensate for their emissions by a factor of 400% to 500%, through a combination of low-carbon construction, eco-friendly operations and a huge tree planting campaign throughout Colorado. Continue reading…

It has folders marked ‘Grasping the victim’s head’ and now – after a £15m revamp and some help from Albert Einstein and the patron saint of the internet – the extraordinary Warburg Institute has a new gallery space to showcase its ‘books emanating sorcery’A mysterious cosmic emblem hangs over the entrance to a building in Bloomsbury, at the heart of London’s university quarter. Depicting concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs, it represents the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century bishop and scholar of the ancient world, as well as patron saint of the internet. What lies within is not a masonic lodge, though, or the HQ of the Magic Circle, but the home of one of most important and unusual collections of visual, scientific and occult material in the world. Long off-limits to passersby, the Warburg Institute has now been reborn, after a £14.5m transformation, with a mission to be more public than ever.“We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,” says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country. Continue reading…

My father, John Wheatley, who has died aged 86, was an architect with a remarkably diverse range of work.He established John Wheatley Architects in 1968, running the practice from home alongside his teaching commitments, and his students made good use of this, through field visits or on placements. Some of them went on to become employees and partners as the practice expanded over the years. Continue reading…

From razor-wire fences and crumbling cells to no windows and overcrowding, conditions in most jails mean rehabilitation is a nonstarter. Here’s how we can create better spaces for prisonersArriving at a prison – any prison – still makes my heart race a little faster. I have been to more than 100 prisons for my research into how architecture and design can assist in rehabilitating offenders. But my first visit after 18 months of lockdown, to a prison deep in one of England’s most rural counties, felt especially disorienting. I sat quietly for a moment looking up at the towering wall that encircles the car park. It’s topped with coils of razor wire that unfurl like a giant, spiky Slinky, scaring off curious pigeons, but catching every plastic carrier bag that floats on the breeze.The surly brick edifice doesn’t reveal an obvious entrance. Straight ahead is a large door, but it’s for the vehicles that bring inmates to the prison. You’ll probably have seen the white escort vans on the motorway. Known as “sweatboxes” or “meat wagons”, they are three-tonne trucks with darkly tinted square windows placed high up on the side. Inside are small compartments like upright coffins, three feet wide, three feet deep and seven feet tall, with a moulded plastic seat and no seatbelt. Some people spend long hours in these vans as they are transported, sometimes hundreds of miles, between courts and prisons. Continue reading…

My friend Stephen Bond, who has died aged 69 of heart failure, was a groundbreaking heritage consultant and conservation surveyor.Stephen’s reputation as a leading heritage practitioner was cemented by his directorship of the Tower Environs Scheme (TES), which ran from 1997 to 2005. A regeneration initiative for the area surrounding the Tower of London, TES was innovative in pioneering a holistic understanding of heritage assets within their historical, cultural and built environments. Continue reading…

Buoyed by the team’s success in 2022, the kingdom is eyeing a bigger goalThe rendering is dramatic, a vast white stadium inspired by the design of a Maghrebi communal tent, known as a moussem.The language used to describe it is no less flowery: think of it as “almost like a Noah’s Ark, a place for all nature and animals to come together”, says Tarik Oualalou, head of Paris architecture firm Oualalou + Choi, one of five teams in the design consortium. Continue reading…