Architecture in the news

Almost 200 artists in the Altadena neighbourhood have had their homes or studios burned down, while modernist buildings and irreplaceable collections have been destroyedFires are a seasonal recurrence in the dry chaparral region of Los Angeles. Often fanned by the Santa Anas, gales known as the “devil winds,” they spark easily in the long, hot months of summer and autumn. But on 7 January, when those winds blew at 85 mph through areas parched from winter drought, a hurricane of fire swept into lower-lying – and densely populated – areas that had never seen such blazes before. The flames incinerated thousands of homes and priceless cultural heritage, marking the worst natural disaster in LA history. The second largest city in the US and a global cultural capital – home to the Hollywood film industry and a rich contemporary art scene – may never be the same again.More than a week on, with the Eaton fire 81% contained and the massive Palisades fire only 52% contained, the LA arts community is still taking stock of the losses. Altadena, a middle-class residential neighbourhood that is home to many artists, was particularly devastated by the Eaton Fire. According to artist Andrea Bowers, 190 artists have lost or suffered significant damage to their homes, studios, and work. That figure comes from Grief and Hope, a survey and relief fund Bowers launched on 9 January with several other arts professionals, including fellow artist Kathryn Andrews, who lost her home to the Palisades fire. The tally continues to rise. Continue reading…

In its heyday, Chettinad in southern India was a thriving hub of international traders. Today, the grandeur of their homes is being restored by a community keen to celebrate the houses’ cultural importance and promote them to touristsThe single-stone granite pillars and Burmese teak beams of Chettinad’s heritage hotels are adorned with strands of marigolds, while the verandas and corridors are hung with small, handmade palm-leaf parrots that sway gracefully among fragrant blooms. Six-metre-long banners made of Chettinad cotton sarees proclaim “The Chettinad Heritage and Cultural festival”.At first glance, it is hard to believe that these grand mansions turned heritage hotels were ever neglected. Built by the illustrious Chettiar merchant community from the middle of the 19th century to the 1950s, they spread across the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, eventually dwindling to the 73 villages and two towns that remain today across 1,550 sq km (600 sq miles).Visalam hotel decorated for the Chettinad Heritage and Cultural festival Continue reading…

Its dean has launched an emergency appeal to raise £300k by the end of March as costs climb to over £2m a yearBeneath the breathtaking oak ceiling of Peterborough Cathedral, on which images of kings, saints, bishops and a monkey riding a goat were painted nine centuries ago, the Very Rev Chris Dalliston pondered how to keep this magnificent edifice afloat in the face of financial calamity.Dalliston, the cathedral’s de facto CEO in a dog collar, has done his best to avert the looming crisis. The cathedral, built as a monastery in the 12th century, has become a venue for concerts, banquets, exhibitions, corporate events and even a controversial Ibiza-themed party night as well as daily religious services. Assets have been sold or rented. Continue reading…

This megacity is like Hong Kong on steroids – a vertically sprawling, astonishing urban phenomenon that can only be understood in three dimensionsGoogle Maps can be unreliable at the best of times when you’re travelling in China, but in the southern megacity of Chongqing, a map of any kind turns out to be almost entirely useless. Built across a series of impossibly steep mountainsides and vertiginous valleys at the dramatic confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers, it is an astonishing urban phenomenon to behold – a vertically sprawling city that can only be understood in three dimensions. It is a place where neighbourhoods cling to cliffs, connected by elevated roads 20 storeys up in the air. Metro lines emerge from tunnels through the mountains, only to plunge straight through the middle of residential skyscrapers, which themselves sprout improbably from the sheer slopes. Something that looks close by on the map can turn out to be tens of storeys above or below you. And getting there usually makes for an exhilarating journey.I first found myself in Chongqing 10 years ago, almost by accident, after my first attempt to enter North Korea was abruptly quashed when Kim Jong Un decided to close the borders overnight, because of his fears that foreigners might bring in Ebola. Stranded in Beijing with time to kill, a photographer friend recommended we head south to Chongqing. “It’s like Hong Kong on steroids,” was enough to convince me.Nothing prepares you for the multi-level madness of this sprawling metropolitan region of 32 million people. Hong Kong might be known for its elevated walkways and urban escalators that zigzag up its steep slopes, but Chongqing takes this 3D cityscape to a whole new level. To get to places that looked like a couple of blocks away, I found myself taking steep staircases that led to underground escalators, then across walkways to lifts that ferried me up the side of a cliff. Cable cars swooshed past outdoor plazas, where what I thought was the ground level turned out to be the roof terrace of an office block, which plunged 30 storeys down into the valley below. Continue reading…

Oscar-tipped film The Brutalist is the latest stage in the cultural rehabilitation of what was once architecture’s most reviled style but is now winning a new generation of admirersThis week an Oscar-tipped film, The Brutalist, opens in Britain. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-plus saga in which Adrien Brody plays the brilliant but tormented fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor struggling to make a life in the postwar US. He’s a singular, solitary, single-minded genius, always working alone, in the mould of Gary Cooper in the 1949 film of Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead and Adam Driver in last year’s Megalopolis. Tóth is, like them, forever fighting the misunderstanding and spite of mean-spirited adversaries. He would rather shovel coal (as Cooper’s Howard Roark drilled stone in a quarry) than compromise his principles.The film’s title is a dramatic stage on the redemption arc of what was architecture’s most reviled style. Its makers evidently felt that the word would attract and intrigue audiences (while also carrying some ambiguity – there being a question in the film as to who is brutalising whom) and would be a fitting epithet for a man who, while complex and flawed, is a hero. To get an idea of how improbable this might once have seemed, imagine a film called The Former Post Office Chief Executive and Ordained Priest. There was a time, in the 1980s, when a writer in a national newspaper demanded that practitioners of brutalism be “taken out and shot”. Continue reading…

As fires set LA ablaze, some houses are left standing amid ashes thanks to concrete walls, class A wood – and luckWhen last week’s fires in Los Angeles set parts of the city ablaze, one viral image was of a lone house in Pacific Palisades that was left standing while all of the homes around it were destroyed.Architect Greg Chasen said luck was the main factor in the home’s survival, but the brand-new build had some design features that also helped: a vegetation-free zone around the yard fenced off by a solid concrete perimeter wall, a metal roof with a fire-resistant underlayment, class A wood and a front-gabled design without multiple roof lines. Continue reading…

Architectural historians say success of Brady Corbet’s film could help in fight to protect heritage of divisive style“A mildewed lump of elephant droppings” is how King Charles, then Prince of Wales, described the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth after a visit to one of the UK’s most notable examples of brutalist architecture.His verdict was typical of those who take issue with the modernist architectural movement, characterised by imposing forms of raw concrete, whose buildings still rank among the most lamented – and celebrated – structures in the country. Continue reading…

US bank will spend almost as much to renovate Citi Tower skyscraper as it paid for site in the first placeThe US bank Citigroup is to spend £1bn to renovate its skyscraper in Canary Wharf, London, the latest firm to signal its commitment to office working.The Wall Street lender will end up spending nearly as much on renovating the 130,000 sq metre (1.4m sq ft) building as it did on buying the site. Many City firms tend to lease their office space, but the bank bought what is now Citi Tower for £1.2bn in 2019. Continue reading…

A century of foolhardy development, including public subsidies for rebuilding in the firebelt, hugely contributed to this tragedy, writes our architecture critic. LA must rethink – and build upwards not outwards‘Crime don’t climb” is one of the glib mottoes long used by Los Angeles real estate agents to help sell the multimillion dollar homes in the hills that surround the sprawling metropolis. Residents of the lush ridges and winding canyons can rest assured, in their elevated green perches – safely removed from the smog-laden, supposedly crime-ridden flatlands beneath. What the realtors neglect to mention, however, is that, while crime rarely ascends the hills, flames certainly do. And that the very things that make this sun-soaked city’s dream homes so attractive – lush landscaping, quaint timber construction, raised terrain and narrow, twisting lanes – are the very things that make them burn so well. They create blazing infernos that, as we have seen over the past week, are tragically difficult to extinguish.LA’s ferocious wildfires have seen an area about three times the size of Manhattan incinerated. At least 12,000 homes have burned to the ground and 150,000 people have been evacuated, as entire neighbourhoods become smouldering ruins. Twenty-five people have died, 24 more are missing. Estimates suggest the cost of damage and economic losses could reach $250bn, making it the costliest wildfire in US history – mainly due to the flames torching some of the highest-value real estate in the country. And it’s not over yet. The city is bracing for further destruction, as weather forecasts suggest winds might pick up again. Continue reading…

London architect who moved to Shetland and created buildings sympathetic to the islands’ landscape and traditions In 1969 Richard Gibson, who has died aged 89, was appointed deputy county architect in Shetland. Moving with his family from north London to the northernmost islands of the United Kingdom enabled him to keep alive the ideals of modern architecture – in particular that good design should serve the public benefit – long after they went out of fashion elsewhere in the country.After three years he set up his own practice, Richard Gibson Architects. He kept going through its unremunerative early years with the help of income from his wife Victoria’s successful knitwear business. Continue reading…

Building with links to Labour and Tories earmarked for disadvantaged young people wins National Lottery fundingA 319-year-old Grade II-listed building in the heart of Bristol that was the headquarters of the precursor to the modern Labour party has been awarded £4.7m for a major renovation.Kingsley Hall is deeply woven into Bristol’s history and has been witness to various social movements. Continue reading…

Victor Kossakovsky’s follow-up to Gunda is a gorgeously shot reverie about our use of materials such as stone and concreteThe granite face of a quarry shatters into boulders, cascading in mesmerising slow motion; a man with a wheelbarrow potters around the Roman ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon; bulldozers and diggers pick over the shattered fragments of a bombed-out Ukrainian housing complex; an Italian architect commissions a stone circle for his garden, hovering fretfully as the landscapers toil in the snow to finish the design feature.The latest film from Victor Kossakovsky, who documented the lives of farm animals in the sublime Gunda, Architecton is a gorgeously photographed poetic reverie on the subject of stone and concrete, permanence and profligate waste. It’s a gentler documentary, but calls to mind Behemoth, the extraordinary film about industrialisation in China by the artist and film-maker Zhao Liang. Both are works of striking visual poetry that ask difficult questions about humankind’s impact on the planet.In UK and Irish cinemas Continue reading…

East Bank, Stratford, LondonBuilt in Italian red brick by acclaimed Irish practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, Sadler’s Wells’s vibrant new sister theatre provides six dance studios, elegant auditorium – and a big welcome to allThere’s an idea among some architects that a building should somehow resemble the purposes it serves: that an airport should evoke flight; a democratic building should be transparent; an art museum should look like a piece of sculpture. It doesn’t take long to see the limits of this notion. It may be droll, for example, to serve strawberries on strawberry-shaped dishes, but they don’t taste better for it. Monet’s Water Lilies wouldn’t be improved by showing them against blotchy wallpaper in bright impressionist colours. You may similarly want architecture to complement rather than compete.And so it is with ballet. The last thing choreographers and dancers want, I’m told by people who know, are spaces that swoop and curve in imitation of human movement. They want right angles, straight lines, fixed points and level horizons against which to gauge their actions. Which is why the Dublin-based architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, who in buildings such as their Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for the London School of Economics were not averse to some eccentric shapes, have designed the new Sadler’s Wells East – a “powerhouse for dance”, it calls itself – as a series of piled-up and interlocking rectangular boxes. Continue reading…

Why this hierarchy of heritage? Our obsession with buildings and artefacts is blinding us to the value of natureI was struck last week by a story about Alton, a town in Hampshire, where residents have hit on a new basis for object to development in the area: Jane Austen sometimes used to walk there from nearby Chawton. The surrounding landscape, a petition reads, is therefore an important part of our literary heritage and must not be built on.On the one hand, this is a story about nimbyism and the lengths to which people will go to try to prevent the nightmare of local housebuilding: months of extra noise, increased traffic, a destroyed view and the headache-inducing realisation that complaining about any of this will probably put you in the wrong. After all, as some smug person living outside the development zone will rightly remind you, Britain badly needs more houses and we have to build them somewhere.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading…

It needs to realise its Victorian buildings are an asset rather than a liability, writes Richard Owen; plus a letter from Douglas AndersonI read Libby Brooks’s article (‘Left to rot’: Glasgow’s crumbling heritage comes into focus for 850th anniversary, 2 January) on the bus home from Glasgow city centre, and there was depressingly little in its summary of Glasgow’s architectural woes that I could disagree with.However, Glasgow’s problem with its built environment isn’t short-term: it is a city that lost almost half of its population over a five-decade period from 1951 onwards, with a city centre footprint (including a stock of wonderful Victorian buildings) that is disproportionately large when compared with the size of its economy. Merging the Greater Glasgow councils might help the boundary issue identified in the article, but wouldn’t address the fundamental funding problem. Continue reading…

A beautifully-illustrated account of the Middle Eastern influence on Europe’s great buildingsFrom Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced. The cross-pollination extended from design and materials to people – the shimmering gold mosaics that cover the interiors of both buildings are attributed to the Byzantine master craftsmen whose forerunners decorated the churches of Constantinople and Ravenna.This sun-drenched historical patchwork could seem a long way from the gloom of early medieval Europe. But in Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts. It is a companion to Darke’s previous book, Stealing from the Saracens, which argued that European masterpieces from Notre-Dame to St Paul’s took inspiration from the Muslim world, and whose eye-catching examples included Big Ben’s resemblance to the 11th-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo. Continue reading…

They were built to instil fear. Now these giant domed jails, which date back to the 1700s, are being turned into creative centres – complete with cells for rent and escape roomsOne of the architectural features that marks out the skyline of Haarlem, a small Dutch city, is a 37.6m-high dome, crowning a rotunda. You might assume it was built for religious purposes – until you notice the bars covering its 230 windows.​​Operating as a prison from 1899 until 2016, the Koepelgevangenis (“dome prison”) is one of three panoptic penitentiaries built in the Netherlands. All were shut down in the past decade as part of the country’s drive to reduce its prison population and are now being repurposed as arts venues. Continue reading…

Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary offers awesome drone-shot sequences of wrecked and ruined buildings, but could have been constructed more solidlyVictor Kossakovsky is the author of some ambitious and immersively sensory documentaries, including Aquarela from 2018, about the climate crisis, and Gunda from 2020, about the consciousness of animals. Now he has created this monolithic, almost wordless and vehement meditation on concrete and stone; the building materials which are so substantial and yet appear, in the many drone-shot sequences of wrecked and ruined buildings, to be also temporary and almost fragile – their durability revealing itself finally in the almost overwhelming problem of simply how to clear it all away, how to get rid of the smashed and useless rubble. The mysterious shots of stone being crushed or broken in quarries show a violence in the harvesting of stone being analogous to future destruction.There are some powerful images here, of shattered buildings in Ukraine, ruined by war, and those in Turkey, destroyed by the 2023 earthquake; these are juxtaposed with the musings of Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, who is shown studying the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon and also creating for himself a stone circle in his garden, which he describes quaintly as a “magic circle”. Continue reading…

It’s got triple-height splendour and 1550s wall paintings likely inspired by Emperor Nero’s villa in Rome. Our writer plays lord of the manor at Calverley Hall – once home to knights, weavers, stonemasons and murderersA ghostly bearded face peers out from the wall of a bedroom, flanked by a pair of winged, snake-like beasts baring their teeth, their necks chained to an ermine roundel. The pattern repeats around the room like psychedelic wallpaper, featuring slithery creatures with long curling tongues, a jester in a horned cap, and mysterious figures with clownish faces and barrels for bodies, all crowned with a frieze of white Yorkshire roses.This trippy scene, in Calverley Old Hall in West Yorkshire, is one of the most important surviving Tudor wall paintings in the country, thought to date from the 1550s, when it was likely inspired by decorations recently discovered in Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea villa in Rome. It had been lost for centuries, hidden behind the floral wallpaper of a cottage bedroom. Continue reading…

Interest has surged since relaxation of planning rules last March, but technical difficulties often loom largeOn a busy high street in Balham, south London, stands a boxy, beige-fronted building. Built in the 1940s, for decades the four-storey office block was home to hundreds of civil servants until Department for Work and Pensions officials moved out in 2020.Now, Irene House boasts 77 one- and two-bedroom upmarket apartments with seven more homes inside a roof extension. It still has its art deco entrance and other features inspired by the building’s original interior, and represents a growing trend: to convert office blocks into homes. Continue reading…