Architecture in the news

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, AKA ‘the Wigwam’, recognised as one of UK’s most important buildingsIt’s known locally as the “Wigwam” or the “Mersey Funnel”, although one architect also likened it to “a gargantuan concrete aberration from the Apollo space programme”.Love it or not, Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral can now be regarded as one of the most important buildings in the UK. Continue reading…

A genius response bridging of history and modernity with daring interior and exterior, it is shocking it wasn’t already Grade I-listedLiverpool’s Catholic cathedral has listing upgraded to Grade ILiverpool’s majestic cosmic wigwam has always faced a hard time from critics. Classicists lamented that it replaced an earlier swollen baroque design by Edwin Lutyens, which was cut short by the second world war and rising costs. Modernists found it too prissy, a brittle British version of more muscular concrete creations emerging from sunnier southern climes – a piece of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília lost in translation between the hemispheres.Time has proved them wrong. Frederick Gibberd’s striking upturned funnel is one of the finest postwar buildings in the land, standing as the most prominent Catholic cathedral of any British city, as well as the most original. It is shocking that it wasn’t already Grade-I listed – a fact that reflects a broader antipathy for buildings of the era, which is slowly being corrected by a new generation. Continue reading…

From fungi-based wall panels to 3D printed bricks made of seaweed, biomaterials are increasingly being used in construction. But how close are they to a home near you?Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe average person might simply see green goop, but when Ben Hankamer looks at microalgae, he sees the building blocks of the future.Prof Hankamer, from the Institute of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland, is one of a growing number of people around the world exploring ways living organisms and their products can be integrated into our built environment – from algae-based bricks to straw or fungi wall panels, and render made from oyster shells. Continue reading…

Foreign Office staff | Children’s books | Persnicketiness | Present participles | Pure tennis poetry | Shag carpetThree hundred Foreign Office staff with consciences, and concerns about UK policy on Gaza that they raised in a letter to the foreign secretary, should not be told by their Whitehall superiors that “an honourable course” is to resign from the civil service (Report, 10 June). No. The honourable course for the government is to act on these informed concerns and on our complicity, so far, in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.Laura ConynghamCrediton, Devon• While I bemoan the fall in the number of children’s books featuring ethnic-minority main characters (Letters, 10 June), books featuring children of east Asian origin have been lacking for years, and still are. My 11-year-old granddaughter has mixed British/east Asian heritage, and I don’t think we’ve ever found books with children who look like her. The same applies to children’s birthday cards. A gap in the market that needs to be rectified, perhaps?Barbara ThompsonAston, South Yorkshire Continue reading…

It is a ‘queer Xanadu’, a sliver of sand where weekend-long revelling takes place in fabulous modernist beach-houses. As Fire Island gets its mojo back, we celebrate the Speedos-wearing architect who defined its lookPosters advertising a “bear weekend” cling to the utility poles on Fire Island, punctuating the wooden boardwalks that meander through a lush dune landscape of beach grass and pitch pine. It’s not a celebration of grizzlies, by the looks of the flyers, but of large bearded men in small swimming trunks, bobbing in the pools and sprawled on the sundecks of mid-century modernist homes. You might also find them frolicking in the bushes of this idyllic car-free island, a nature reserve of an unusual kind that stretches in a 30-mile sliver of sand off the coast of Long Island in New York.Over the last century, Fire Island Pines, as the central square-mile section of this sandy spit is known, has evolved into something of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 homes, it is a place of mythic weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but also simply a secluded haven where people can be themselves. Continue reading…

Tskaltubo enjoyed years of prosperity as a jewel of Soviet architecture. But after the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 the sanatoriums were abandoned, and in 1992 people fleeing the war in Abkhazia found refuge here. While efforts continue to restore the spa town to its former glory, silence and greenery prevail as a few families hold out amid the rubbleThe right to rest for workers was enshrined in the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union. Article 119 guaranteed “annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoriums”. Fourteen years earlier, the 1922 labour code had established that every worker was entitled to two weeks of annual leave and hundreds of sanatoriums were built across the vast territory that made up the Soviet socialist republics. These establishments, conceived as a combination of health resorts and medical centres, served as places for workers to rest and recuperate, thus helping to optimise their productivity.Bath House No 8, located in Central Park where the hot springs spring forth, is the UFO-shaped Tskaltubo spa with a curved, circular roof and a central opening that lets in light. Continue reading…

Marina Tabassum has built emergency homes for the delta-dwellers of the Ganges using grass and bamboo. Her Serpentine pavilion – part tropical glasshouse, part 70s office block – is a chic, meditative place for an overpriced coffeePast pavilions have taken the form of inflatable balloons, teetering plastic pyramids and cork-lined lairs dug into the ground. We have seen a fibreglass cocoon perched on boulders, a wildflower garden enclosed by tar-daubed walls, and an assortment of undulating canopies, clad in polished steel and jagged slate. Now, to celebrate 25 years of building experimental structures on its front lawn, London’s Serpentine gallery has unveiled its first pavilion that moves.“Every time you think of an idea for the project,” says Marina Tabassum, the Bangladeshi architect behind this year’s kinetic enclosure, “you realise, ‘Oh, that’s already been done.’” This is the eternal dilemma for any designer selected for this prestigious annual commission: how to concoct a novel structure on a tight deadline that will enrapture park-goers, entertain corporate sponsors, and appeal to collectors, who are ultimately expected to acquire the thing – as well as, most importantly, provide a shelter for an overpriced coffee. Continue reading…

Using passive design and local materials such as ice cream buckets, these modern community spaces offer a respite from urban heat and hustle Continue reading…

Flamingo Lodge – constructed from repurposed shipping containers on stilts – replaces Florida facility battered by hurricanes Katrina and WilmaA collection of repurposed shipping containers, welded together and fitted out to create an innovative new eco-hotel inside one of the country’s most popular national parks, offers a vision of revival and resilience at the beginning of another potentially active Atlantic hurricane season.The containers exist as the elevated 24-room Flamingo Lodge at the exposed southern tip of Florida’s Everglades national park. It was built to replace the 1960s-era cinderblock construction that was finally demolished in 2009, four years after back-to-back hurricanes, Katrina and Wilma, tore it apart. Continue reading…

V&A East Storehouse, LondonThe Victoria & Albert’s new warehouse boasts a mind-boggling 250,000 artefacts. Our art critic tries its ‘order an object’ service and gets intimate with some national treasures – including ‘the biggest Picasso in the world’• ‘The national museum of absolutely everything’: our architecture critic visits the StorehouseOn a table in a study room at the new V&A East Storehouse, a silk-embroidered Alexander McQueen dress decorated with Hieronymus Bosch paintings has been laid out for me to see intimately. Creatures from The Garden of Earthly Delights cavort and gurn in my face, including a bird monster perched on a high stool that defecates out sinners. Ah, the privileges of a critic – except it isn’t my special experience at all. This opportunity for a personal encounter with an exquisite object is available to everyone and anyone, free of charge, as part of this unprecedented reinvention of the Victoria & Albert Museum that is V&A East Storehouse. It isn’t even difficult to arrange. All you do is look up the collection online and, if an object is in the Storehouse, you add it to your cart of up to five treasures, place an order, and in a fortnight they will be available for your private delight.You can choose anything from theatre posters to Renaissance paintings to shoes. If they’re movable they will be brought to the study room, if not you go to them. I recommend the Ajanta paintings in the ground floor storage facility where I found one towering over me, its damaged parts covered with what looked like sticking plasters, adding to the mystery of this great mass of red and green out of which emerge sharply portrayed people. It’s a full-size copy of one of the Ajanta cave paintings in India – one of 300 made for the V&A in the late 19th century by a team from Bombay School of Art. Continue reading…

Poison darts, a dome from Spain, priceless spoons and Frank Lloyd Wright furniture … our architecture critic is wowed by how the V&A East Storehouse lets visitors ‘breathe the same air’ as its 250,000 artefacts• ‘Pop a masterpiece in your basket’: our art critic reviews the Storehouse‘We used to have something called social housing,” you will be able to tell your grandchildren, should you ever take them to V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new outpost in east London. High up in the atrium, at the centre of this huge open-access repository of 250,000 objects, hangs a chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist council estate in nearby Poplar that was recently bulldozed to make way for less affordable housing. Deftly suspended from the gantry, the poignant fragment now seems as much a relic of a bygone age as the 15th-century Islamic dome from a Spanish palace that is displayed across the hall. The estate’s precast concrete panels have been reassembled with just the same care as the dome’s intricate wooden marquetry, with doorhandles and letterboxes neatly arranged alongside memories of former residents, as well as artwork made with local kids exploring the “ethics of care”.Such striking juxtapositions, and the often contentious stories behind them, lie at the heart of the new £65m facility, which provides a thrilling window into the sprawling stacks of our national museum of everything. But it is much more than just a window – it’s a total immersion. Unlike other open-access museum stores, which tend to offer a furtive peek through glass, the Storehouse thrusts visitors right into the middle of the action. You can roam the gantries while forklift trucks trundle to and fro beneath your feet. You might see someone unloading a porcelain statue, or polishing a priceless collection of spoons, or gingerly packing poison darts. And you’re right in there with them, at the heady coalface of conservation. Continue reading…

Critics say ‘phallic’ 38-storey commercial tower next to state parliament is ‘the wrong building in the wrong place’Australia news live: latest politics updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAdelaide’s first skyscraper will be a “phallic” construction overshadowing the birthplace of women’s suffrage, critics say.The Walker Corporation has begun work on a 38-storey commercial building next to Parliament House on North Terrace, which is known as the city’s cultural boulevard.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…

Volunteers, organized by landscape architecture firm Terremoto, clear invasive plants and restore native fauna: ‘It’s a years-long relationship with the land’ Continue reading…

Alan and Jane Hill’s home-building project is stymied by soaring costs, while a community centre renovated to Passivhaus standard is celebrated by Jenny LittlewoodRegarding Adrian Birch’s letter (Britain should adopt the Passivhaus standard to cut energy costs in new homes, 21 May), we have been attempting to build a Passivhaus standard home. However, we cannot justify building to that standard because the cost has risen over the past two years to £3,800 per sq metre for a 165-sq-metre timber-frame build.Obviously, if the nation’s housebuilding companies did try to build to Passivhaus standard, the costs would be less due to economies of scale but, given their constant complaining that they cannot afford to do so, and our government’s refusal to stipulate higher environmental standards, it seems highly unlikely that they will try to future-proof their often poorly built and designed homes. As for our desperately needed social homes, if building costs remain as high, how many will be able to be built to a Passivhaus standard? Continue reading…

Monumental works by the likes of Alexander Calder and Andy Goldsworthy draw huge crowds to the verdant landmark in New York’s Hudson Valley. Now these visitors can have a ‘restroom experience’ on a par with its spectacular sculpturesUnless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show. “It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined “outdoor lobby”, while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points.Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park. Storm King now boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder’s 17-metre tall The Arch stands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride. Mark di Suvero’s trio of colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi’s 40-tonne granite peach nestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy’s drystone wall winds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots. In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature. Continue reading…

Sidewinder Ranch, a 40-acre property built over natural rock formations, comes with desert views and a bulldozerWant to commune with nature? Bring the outside in? Ditch your white-noise machine for a babbling brook going through your living room?A home that went on the market last month in Arizona offers all this and more. Sidewinder Ranch is a 40-acre hillside property built over natural rock formations. Every room is of geological interest, with a TV shelf perched on rock and boulders creeping to the foot of the bed. A fountain built inside has the feel of a mountain stream, and the property has stunning desert views. “Buy 40 acres but it might as well be 400,” read the listing. Continue reading…

Clichy-Batignolles, in the city’s north-west, is emblematic of the ‘15-minute’ city approach to urban planning Continue reading…

Cash-strapped council may seek to raise funds from ratepayers, state and federal governments, or road users to fix 85-year-old Story BridgeGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastWhen the ribbon was cut on Brisbane’s Story Bridge on 6 July 1940, it was not an auspicious time to open a new bridge. Five days earlier, the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge had opened in Washington State.In just four months that structure would make engineering history by dramatically swinging itself apart, a result of forces the engineering profession, at that time, did not understand.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…

Graham Cook points to shared styles of thatching across England and Wales, and John Dilworth highlights two recent setbacks for violin-making Your article on the sad decline in some British crafts (Welsh thatching and ship figurehead carving added to UK crafts red list, 13 May) noted that “thatched roofs in Wales are becoming ‘more similar to English styles of thatch’. The Welsh style is different, with a rounder outside appearance.” There is in fact no such thing as “Welsh” thatching, or “English” come to that. In both the north and south of Wales, the craft has long shared styles with its English neighbours. Angular work in the north is also found in Lancashire and Cheshire, while rounded thatch in combed cereal straw in the very south is identical to that found in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. This has been the case for at least two centuries.The type of thatch seen in the photo published online with your article was common in south-west Wales, but the “rolled gable” feature can be still found from Northamptonshire to Dumfries. The original straw roping on these Welsh roofs was also seen in Ireland, along with the decorative “rope top” ridging, once widespread throughout Wales. In doing research for my website, thatchinginfo.com, I realised that the craft follows no political boundaries. The various traditional styles are essentially a combination of climate and material supply, perhaps combined with some very early folk movements.Graham CookMilborne Port, Somerset Continue reading…

Country hospital brought back from the ashes wins top heritage prizeAustralia news live: latest politics updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA colonial country hospital almost totally destroyed by fire more than two decades ago has won the top prize in the National Trust of Australia (NSW) heritage awards.The recognition of heritage architecture and conservation projects in the built and natural environment takes place across each state annually. New South Wales staged its awards on Friday, announcing 20 winners across 10 categories. Continue reading…