Architecture in the news

How architects worked with harsh environment to create sustainable building in location where fossils were foundViewed from afar, the silver-hued Hami Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space base on Mars. Viewed from above, it resembles a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Nestled in the Gobi desert, in north-west China, the new tourist attraction showcases hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs. But far from reflecting its prehistoric exhibits, the building itself is a modern-day architectural specimen.Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and sprawling solar farms, the museum is able to operate sustainably while withstanding an extremely harsh environment. Continue reading…

Rising from bluebell woodlands and framed by rolling hills, this cluster of pink and brown brick towers in Croydon is a bittersweet winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling prizeIf Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds.Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street in Norwich scooped the gong in 2019, for its rows of low-energy brick terraces, designed by Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley. This year’s winner, Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, is an entirely different animal, and it puts a welcome spotlight back on housing design at a time when the government plans to pump £39bn into the sector. It is also a bittersweet vindication of Croydon council’s erstwhile housebuilding company, Brick by Brick, a bold and sadly brief experiment by the previous Labour administration, which was halted in 2020 when the council went bankrupt, seeing numerous projects cancelled. Continue reading…

Change of council leadership hands reprieve to residents of architecturally celebrated developments in LambethTwo architecturally celebrated council estates in south London that have been under threat of demolition for more than a decade have been saved.Residents of Cressingham Gardens and the Central Hill estate have campaigned tirelessly for their homes to be saved, saying the low-density 1960s developments are significant in design and popular with those living there. Continue reading…

They are some of our oldest and most historically significant buildings, yet they receive no secure state funding, writes Dr Coco Parkinson-HugginsJonathan Davies’ article (Abide with me: English choral music is a living part of our cultural heritage – we should cherish it, 7 October) speaks beautifully to the contribution of English choral music to our living cultural heritage, highlighting the importance of cathedral choirs in particular, in giving children access to “world-class musical training, extraordinary cultural experiences and educational opportunities that might otherwise be beyond their reach”.What he misses however, is just how under threat these bastions of England’s religious, cultural and spiritual heritage actually are. Continue reading…

His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deservesIn the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.The name was a dig at Finland, which the architectural maestro believed had taken him for granted. Other nations, he moaned, recognised his talent more than his own. Today, arriving in Helsinki, I find that Finland doesn’t just love Aalto, he’s a national treasure. Continue reading…

Descendant of 19-century artist demands removal of Marc Chagall’s 1960s canvasses that cover original frescoIn 1962, the then French culture minister, André Malraux, reportedly bored by the ballet he was watching at Paris’s opera house, raised his eyes to the classical ceiling and decided it needed a makeover.In his ennui, Malraux thought his friend and artist Marc Chagall, sitting next to him at the Palais Garnier at the time, was the man for the job and commissioned him to make a new ceiling. Continue reading…

It is one of the world’s finest collections, full of Monets, Miros and Picassos. But is the great Swiss architect’s extension for the Beyeler Foundation a worthy addition? Or is it a bit luxury boutique?In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father’s cabinet-making workshop, he designed his first cupboard. He later recalled the satisfaction of fitting the door so perfectly that it closed “with a special sucking sound”, saying his father instilled in him “the Basel pride in the well-built object”.Six decades on, with a fleet of globally celebrated projects to his name, the 83-year-old Swiss architect is back in Basel, beaming with the same local pride. He is gazing out at his latest well-built object, which is also his first project here: a monolithic new gallery that looks chiselled from the earth, its layers of pale crumbly concrete hammered into shape, its big oak and bronze doors – their handles wrapped with leather cord – closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh. Continue reading…

My father, Andrew Rutter, who has died aged 93, was a trained architect and worked in planning for Hampshire county council. He became Winchester’s first conservation officer responsible for championing the city’s old buildings and landscapes.His great gift in that role, which he held from 1974 until his retirement in 1998, was his ability to visualise the effect of planning applications and then to make councillors aware of potential consequences before coming to their decisions. Continue reading…

Photographer Gavin John’s new book, Australian Theatres & Cinemas, documents the country’s finest stage performance and picture palaces – from massive Italian Renaissance-inspired entertainment palaces to 1930s art deco cinemas Continue reading…

The 20 best residential gardens have been revealed in the first-ever Landscape Australia awards shortlist. Jury chair Emily Wong said each project was a response to urgent issues such as the climate crisis, fire and flood resilience, and the loss of biodiversity. They saw gardens as ‘part of a larger living commons that supports different ecologies and also … the future of Australian cities’. Wong also noted that private gardens take up a large quantity of space in Australian cities. ‘So really, these gardens are about seeing the design as a contribution to shared infrastructure’ Continue reading…

Sixty top architecture firms from around the world have mooted 500 eye-catching projects across Albania, sparking fury and protests. Now they’re being celebrated in an 800-page tome that some are calling ‘a smoking gun’Last autumn, I was sitting with a prominent architect in New York, when their phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. They finally checked the messages and chuckled. “Oh, the Albanian Architecture Army chat is blowing up again,” they said. “It looks like Edi has some new projects for us.”Edi was Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania since 2013, who has been presiding over the rapid transformation of the former communist country with a fleet of glamorous building projects. There are twisting towers in Tirana, along with prize-winning public spaces, striking coastal resorts, and many more dazzling visions on the way – all now brought together in a hefty new book, The Albanian Files. Continue reading…

From a neo-baronial country house with turrets in acres of grounds in Scotland to a modernist tower block in a bustling part of London Continue reading…

Residents say shop threatens Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s last surviving tearoom months after vape shop blaze nearbyIn the heart of Glasgow city centre, nestled between shops, bars, offices and hotels, sits the Mackintosh Tearooms, the last surviving tearoom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and one of the city’s most treasured heritage sites.But last week passersby noticed a shiny new shopfront next door to the 1903 category A-listed building: hot-pink capital letters on a white plastic sign, advertising a vape and mobile phone repair shop. Continue reading…

Japan once had a reputation for statement architecture – yet many buildings have been torn down since 2000. A new book reminds us of their futuristic beauty Continue reading…

Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?By James Crawford. Read by David CarlyleRead the text version hereSupport the Guardian today: theguardian.com/longreadpodAdapted from The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance, which will be published by Scribe on 10 September. Continue reading…

At Roland Garros airport on Réunion island, the ceiling design funnels a light tropical breeze into the terminal At the arrivals terminal at Roland Garros airport on Réunion island, visitors are greeted by floor-to-ceiling windows framing the lush green mountains of the French Indian Ocean territory.What they may have also expected was the icy chill of air conditioning; this island just off Madagascar sits in the tropical zone to the south of the equator. But instead, the terminal is cooled by a light tropical breeze, the result of natural ventilation built into its unique design. Continue reading…

In 1965, when he was in his early 20s, my friend Peter Howell, who has died aged 85, was asked by Nikolaus Pevsner to join the buildings committee of the Victorian Society, which had been founded seven years earlier by Pevsner, John Betjeman and others to defend Victorian buildings.Peter remained a member of the committee, which reviewed the cases submitted to the society, for the rest of his life. He had joined the society in 1962 as a result of his horror at a proposal that Balliol College, Oxford – where he was then an undergraduate – might demolish its entrance range, designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1867. This was the beginning of Peter’s crusade to prevent the loss or mutilation of Britain’s 19th-century architectural heritage. Continue reading…

In the UK, 18 million people are hard of hearing – yet there is no dedicated centre for the Deaf community. Now urban planner and activist Amanprit Arnold has made it her missionMeeting outdoors became second nature for most of us over this long, hot summer, but Amanprit Arnold doesn’t get the luxury of choice. She’s sitting at a terrace table when we meet at a cafe because she’s a member of the Deaf community (Deaf with a capital D denotes membership of a unique cultural and linguistic minority).“Nowhere in London is specifically designed for me,” says Arnold, who was born deaf and used hearing aids before getting cochlear implants at 21. “Inside a cafe, the acoustics can be so bad. It’s much easier for me to hear out here.” Continue reading…

In a novel approach to urban housing, some residents have pooled their time and finances into redeveloping single dwellings. It’s a herculean task – with feel-good resultsMelbourne architect Chris Gilbert had run out of eggs. He texted a neighbour and within minutes, he says, their child arrived with some. “Then I made brownies and my kids took some over to the neighbours’ house.”It sounds like a flashback to a bygone era, but this neighbourly exchange took place this month, at the Davison Collaborative, a novel housing project in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. In 2020 the townhouse development replaced one past-its-prime brick veneer house with three architecturally designed three-bedroom family dwellings, trebling the lot’s density and future proofing it “for at least the next 50 years,” says Liam Wallis, from the sustainability focused property development and consultancy company Hip V. Hype. Continue reading…

Tracking apps | Weather forecasts | Parthenon puddles | TautologiesRegarding Adrian Chiles and his tracking apps (Location-tracking apps have turned me into a gibbering wreck – but I just can’t look away, 16 September), I have the reverse issue. I added a phone tracking app to my wife’s phone so that she can track me when I’m out and about on my own (it makes me feel safer on the mean streets of Islington). The problem arises when I call my wife to ask her if she knows where I am – she politely informs me that she doesn’t care, refuses to look at the tracking app, then hangs up! Perhaps she could give Adrian some coaching. Colin Dryland London• I recognise Margaret Squires’ frustration on clashing forecasts on various weather apps (Letters, 11 September). I must confess that I take a less scientific approach. I simply keep checking all the weather apps on my phone until one tells me what I want to hear. This means I often head out with an entirely unjustified confidence in the outlook. At this point, I’m less a weather‑watcher and more a curator of agreeable delusions. Terry O’Hara Maghull, Liverpool Continue reading…