Architecture in the news

Could Norman Foster’s £2bn design for the club, which will be seen 25 miles away, turn out to be a case of hubris before ruin? There’s a phenomenon in architectural history whereby great empires build their grandest monuments just before they fall. The Parthenon was completed just before Athens embarked on the devastating Peloponnesian War. Manhattan’s most celebrated skyscrapers went up on the brink of the Great Depression. The British inaugurated the imposing government buildings of New Delhi 16 years before the end of the Raj. I won’t say that this will definitely be the case with the £2bn stadium designed by the Mancunian Norman Foster for Manchester United Football Club, but it’s striking that it’s proposed at a time when the club has closed its staff canteen and made redundant hundreds of workers to cut costs.Every good thing is promised. It is to be “the world’s greatest football stadium”, iconic AND sustainable, with both rainwater harvesting and a “trident” of 200m-high masts visible from 25 miles away. There is to be a “public space” twice the size of Trafalgar Square and a “mixed use mini-city” around it. There are things to like about the plans, including an attempt to avoid the fortress-like exteriors presented by most stadiums in favour of something more open and lively. But they’d probably do well to concentrate on doing fewer things as well as possible. Otherwise, the building might be like one of those football teams made up of extravagant signings who somehow don’t gel. Continue reading…

Birthday blues | Historic sites | The T-word | Mythical posties | Chiffchaff firstAfter more than 30 years of appearing in it, I have to confess I felt a little disappointed to see that I was omitted from your list (Birthdays, print edition, 15 March). I would like to reassure anyone who might care that I’m still here, and 76 this year. By the way, who is Howard Devoto?John DuttineWorthing, West Sussex• While we marvelled at Amiens Cathedral in France, our son, then eight, commented “I don’t mind coming here when I’m dead, but I really don’t want to be here now” (Letters, 19 March)Patti RundallCambridge Continue reading…

From the earthquake-defying joints that support a 13th-century temple to the delicacy of sashimono puzzle boxes, a new exhibition shows off the myriad possibilities of this centuries-old craftDo you know your ant’s head from your shell mouth? Or your cogged lap from your scarfed gooseneck? These are just some of the mind-boggling array of timber jointing techniques on display in a new exhibition spotlighting the meticulous craft of Japanese carpentry. The basement gallery of London’s Japan House has been transformed into a woody wonder world of chisels and saws, mortises and tenons, and brackets of infinite intricacy, alongside traditional clay plastering, shoji paper screen making and tatami mat weaving. It is a dazzling display of the phenomenal skills behind centuries of timber architecture and joinery, celebrating elite master carpenters with the spiritual reverence of a high priesthood. “In Japan we have a deep respect for our forests,” says curator Nishiyama Marcelo, who heads up the team at the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kobe, a temple to the history of Japanese joinery. “If a carpenter uses a 1,000-year-old tree, they must be prepared to take on more than 1,000 years of responsibility for the building that they create.”It is a momentous duty, and one we should heed. As debates around the embodied carbon of the built environment dominate the construction industry, there could be no more timely exhibition to remind us of the importance of designing with longevity, care and repair in mind. Numerous specialist tools have been shipped over from the Kobe museum, along with a team of master carpenters who have built a remarkable series of structures in the gallery, replicating parts of buildings that have lasted for hundreds of years in the face of wind, rain, snow and earthquakes. Continue reading…

The UK’s top creatives have put together a list of makers who put sustainability first. Using everything from reclaimed rattan and bacteria-dyed fabrics to algorithmic design, these trailblazers are making positive steps forward for people and planetI feel hopeful about the impact of design on the world,” says fashion designer Foday Dumbuya, “It has the power to drive change by addressing social issues, promoting sustainability, and enhancing quality of life.”In September this year, the UK hosts the World Design Congress (WDC), where the best minds from business, education and research get together to discuss how design can do just this. Continue reading…

The kingdom’s old capital is a world heritage site – and it has now honoured its once-biggest industry with a ‘pearling path’ wending through two miles of architectural marvels. But did its car parks really have to be so lavish?Think of contemporary architecture in the Gulf and you might think of gilded towers rising from the desert, eye-popping “iconic” museums, and artificial islands carved into ever more fanciful shapes. But, sandwiched between the petrodollar glitz of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there is an enclave that has been quietly bucking the trend.In Bahrain’s old capital of Muharraq, a place of winding low-rise streets studded with markets and minarets, a project has been under way over the last two decades that goes against the usual penchant for brash bling. It takes the form of a two-mile (3.2km) route that meanders through the densely packed city, linking new public squares and cultural venues, combining careful conservation with daring contemporary interventions. The Pearling Path shows how the treatment of a Unesco world heritage site doesn’t have to mean choosing between preserving a place in aspic, or resorting to Disneyfied pastiche. Continue reading…

Local lad Norman Foster’s plan envisions an enormous canopy over a new stadium and a ‘mixed-use mini-city’. But, given the club’s £1bn debts, the idea seems as flimsy as its own tensile membrane‘What Manchester does today,” Benjamin Disraeli once proclaimed, “the world does tomorrow.” So begins the breathless promotional video for Manchester United’s proposed £2bn football stadium, summoning the words of the Victorian prime minister to launch Norman Foster’s vision for a “mixed-use mini city” beneath a gigantic, three-spired tent.The only thing is, the world has seen quite a lot of big tops before. There is something decidedly retro about the plans, which depict a vast tensile canopy stretched over the 100,000-capacity stadium and its surrounds, covering what Lord Foster says will be “arguably the largest public space in the world”. Putting something bigger than Tiananmen Square under a tent doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing prospect, but then the Man Utd mantra appears to be bigger is better. Continue reading…

An architect has designed a sustainable home inside a glass box, where fruit and veg grow, and their family can thriveSituated on the family farmstead, surrounded by trees and pasture, stands the extraordinary glasshouse where architect Margit Klev and her young family have made their home. Here, Klev has created a house within a house, placing her bespoke building inside a vast glass barn, delivered as a kit from Denmark and erected on site in just two weeks. This glass shell not only protects the family home inside it, but also shelters an indoor garden and garden rooms, where Klev can nurture plants and trees that would never usually survive a Norwegian winter.“Inside the greenhouse I can grow grapes, apricots, nectarines and peaches,” says Klev, whose two greatest passions are architecture and gardening. “I can also grow a lot of herbs around the other plants: parsley, salvia, melissa… herbs that don’t grow so well outside. And I can also use the greenhouse to grow small plants from seeds that I can plant out in the open later on, in the spring or early summer.” Continue reading…

Pioneering architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s no-frills glass box near the ruins of a grand 18th-century folly was an experiment, a second home and a ‘fairy story’ – all of which awaits whoever buys it next…Upper Lawn is a weekend retreat in Wiltshire built by the late architects Alison and Peter Smithson for themselves and their family and used by them from 1959 to 1982. It’s a place of obvious delight, thanks to a garden enclosed by old stone walls in which it stands, a clump of grand old beech trees just outside, and broad views of sweeping countryside beyond. The house itself is a well-proportioned, thoughtfully detailed, somewhat rustic glass box that makes good use of the transparency and openness that modernist building methods made possible. It’s also a work of less obvious riches, a material diary of building and dwelling, a three-dimensional essay on the passage of time. Now it is being put up for sale by its owners for the past 23 years, the graphic designer Ian Cartlidge and his wife, Jo.The Smithsons, acknowledged founders of brutalism, never saw themselves as practising a style, but applying an attitude – one that makes evident the ways buildings are made. Upper Lawn is possibly the purest expression of their ideals. Having to satisfy no clients but themselves, it was a “device”, as Peter (1923-2003) called it, “for trying things out on oneself” and for generating ideas they could use on larger projects, such as their headquarters for the Economist in St James’s, London. Continue reading…

The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own rightThe first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh, Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location, even months after viewing.Presence is the latest entry, then, in a subset of films set in a house that gradually takes on a life and personality of its own – not just a vivid or spectacular set, but a space that begins to dictate proceedings as much as any of the human characters’ actions. Horror cinema is, of course, particularly conducive to this kind of building control – a genre where every cranny is a potential threat or refuge. Continue reading…

Babycham revival | Wurlitzer wonders | School report | Kant touch thisHannah Crosbie writes about Babycham’s potential revival as though it lived up to its original marketing hype as a sophisticated drink for the ladies (Liquid optimism: why Babycham is ripe for a revival, 28 February). As a barman in the 70s, I remember the frequent orders of triple brandy and Babycham. They were often followed by devastation, and I can remember suggesting to the landlord that, if we stopped serving this “alcoholic lemonade”, we’d have less trouble. Unfortunately, my advice was ignored and the fights continued.Mark Holman-LisneyTadley, Hampshire• The theatre or cinema pipe organ (Letters, 27 February) has almost completely faded from public awareness. Those that remain are mostly in the hands of charities and individuals, including the Mighty Wurlitzer in London’s magnificent art-deco Troxy theatre. Let us ensure that these amazing instruments continue to make their special contribution to the world of popular orchestral music.John LeemingVice-president, The Cinema Organ Society Continue reading…

He turns steelworks into parks and makes ‘rebirth bricks’ from earthquake rubble. As the novelist, meditator and ‘accidental architect’ wins the Pritzker prize, we look at the masterful temples, caves and public spaces of this one-man antidote to Chinese bombastPensioners take their evening stroll on an elevated walkway, surrounded by lush thickets of bamboo, as a game of five-a-side football kicks off on a sunken pitch below. Around them, forming a huge C-shaped courtyard, rises a five-storey stack of streets in the sky, where signs advertise everything from yoga and dance studios to skincare clinics, barbecue restaurants and computer programming classes for kids. A long, sloping ramp connects the different levels, knitting the structure together in a zigzag promenade that culminates on the roof, framing views out over the sprawling Chinese megacity of Chengdu. This multi-levelled landscape of leisure, culture and commerce, known as West Village, is the work of architect Liu Jiakun, who has been named as the recipient of this year’s Pritzker prize, the world’s highest accolade in architecture. His is a name that few outside China will know, and yet within the country he is respected as one of the masters of his generation. Over the last four decades he has quietly built an exemplary body of work, mostly in the south-west province of Sichuan, ranging from museums and universities to public spaces and urban plans. Each of his projects channels the spirit of its place, forming carefully crafted backdrops to everyday life – free from the bombast and swagger of much contemporary architecture in China.“I became an architect by accident,” says Liu, speaking through a translator in his studio in Chengdu. Like the man, his office is unassuming, housed in a nondescript tenement building where he also runs a small cafe and gallery. “My teacher told me that the subject would allow me to practise drawing, but I didn’t know more than that when I applied for university.” He is only the second Chinese citizen to receive the Pritzker prize, following Wang Shu in 2012, which is hardly surprising, given that private practice was outlawed in China until the 1990s. The jury praised Liu’s ability to use “Chinese tradition without nostalgia, but as a springboard for innovation”, creating “new architecture that is at once a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape and a remarkable public space.” Born in 1956, on the eve of the great Chinese famine, Liu spent much of his childhood at the hospital where his mother worked. He was sent to the countryside for three years during the Cultural Revolution to work the land, and applied to university when the institutions reopened in the late 1970s. On graduation in 1982, he worked briefly at the state-run Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute, but found the experience dispiriting. “It was a day job,” he says, “but my real interest was in writing.” He left architecture and spent the next decade in Tibet and China’s western province of Xinjiang, where he practised painting, writing and meditation, producing several works of fiction. His dystopian 1999 novel, Bright Moonlight Plan, followed an architect’s futile struggle to build an ideal new town, taking inspiration from Le Corbusier’s tyrannical Radiant City plan (which would have bulldozed the centre of Paris) and the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions. Continue reading…

The Beirut-born, Paris-based architect has beaten a list of top candidates to redesign the museum’s Western Range. It will be the latest in a series of compelling creations which ‘get all the senses engaged’The British Museum, behind its purposeful and orderly front, gets more and more complicated the deeper in you go. It has grand spaces – the white stone and shadowless light of the Norman Foster-designed Great Court, the classical halls designed by its original architect Robert Smirke to display statues of Pharaonic scale, and the Parthenon-sized Duveen Gallery, built in the 1930s to house the marble sculptures from the famous temple. Beyond and between them is a tissue of spaces and passages, hard to navigate, like the back corridors and lumber rooms of a stately home, in which exquisite vases and reliefs languish in dim cases and on dull walls, over floors tiled in the bureaucratic beige of a 1970s revamp.Overhead there’s a hodgepodge of skylights and valley gutters, accreted over time, prone to leaks, which doesn’t strengthen the museum’s case when they resist calls to repatriate those marbles, and other exhibits acquired by dubious means. Heating and ventilation systems are antiquated. For all of which reasons the museum would very much like to renew and partly rebuild the Western Range, which houses some of its most famous objects and accounts for 35% of its total area. Continue reading…

City damaged during occupation by Islamic State group reopens 850-year-old mosque in time for Ramadan as reconstruction gathers pace In the small courtyard of Sara’s grandmother’s house, children are running and playing as if time had never passed. “The house kept our memories,” Sara says, sitting on the sofa of the courtyard. “It seems like we never left. On the contrary, when we came back, we felt we belonged to this house.”Located in the old Iraqi city of Mosul, right behind the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, their home is part of the local cultural heritage. It was heavily damaged during the occupation by Islamic State (IS) and the battle to reclaim the city by Iraqi armed forces, backed by US coalition airstrikes. Sara and her family were forcibly displaced during the fighting in 2017 and for many years feared they would never see their home intact again. Continue reading…

From an apartment in London’s famous Barbican to a penthouse in a former office block in Norwich Continue reading…

Bravo to the musician Mark Mynett for calling out the loss of these instruments as churches close, writes Stephen WilcoxMark Mynett is right – there is a risk that, as churches close and are repurposed, we lose their pipe organs along with them (UK churches need open-mindedness to preserve heritage says heavy metal musician, 23 February).It’s not surprising that a metal musician is calling this out: until the invention of electronic amplification, previous generations who loved loud music would have needed to head to their local church (or town hall, masonic lodge, or any of the other venues housing these marvellous instruments) to get their fix of chest-thumping volume. Continue reading…

Before the Black Death devastated Siena, the city thrummed with energy, expressed in art and architecture designed to dazzle its audience – and which still astonishes 800 years laterIf you want to know the moment of a medieval Italian city’s greatest prosperity, look at the year it began work on its cathedral. In Siena, the magic year was 1226, the start of some 85 years of construction of the duomo, a remarkable gothic structure with an intricately complex, creamy pink facade and stripy, black-and-white campanile. “The scale of ambition is difficult to put into words,” says Laura Llewellyn, one of the curators of The Rise of Painting, the National Gallery’s new exhibition of Sienese art. “The extravagance of it: to appreciate it you need to unknow and unlearn later buildings like the duomos in Florence and St Peter’s in Rome.”But by the 1350s, Siena’s most glorious years in the raging Tuscan sun would be as good as over. After decades of rapid artistic transformation – a half century that saw the art of the city leave behind the distant, hieratic grace of Byzantine-flavoured painting for a world of dynamism, drama and emotion – the Black Death halved the city’s population from 60,000 to 30,000, stripped away its wilder ambitions and dulled its gleaming wealth. One of Siena’s more implausible plans had been to enlarge the already huge cathedral by converting its existing nave into a transept and tacking on to its belly a new, vastly oversized nave on the precipitous edge of one of the city’s peaks. The project was never completed, but ghostly unfinished arches remain as a monument to lost dreams and a raging pandemic. Continue reading…

From ghost trains to backstreet weddings, from demolition sites to ‘alien’s eye views’ of Leeds, groundbreaking photographer Peter Mitchell captures our changing world with his trusty ‘Blad’ – and once even tried to leave itThe Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, after just 40 years, the buildings were crumbling and largely deserted. Over the course of five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented their demolition, from smashed windows and wrecked apartments to abandoned wardrobes and solitary shoes. Finally, when all that was left standing was a lone arch, he tried to photograph the wrecking crew standing in front of it, but couldn’t get the arch in.“So,” Mitchell remembers, “the foreman said, ‘We do have a crane.’ I can’t stand heights but they lowered the crane down so I could stand on it, then lifted me up to quickly get the shot. I was swaying about a bit and all but one of them came out blurred – but I got the picture.” Continue reading…

This critically acclaimed drama about how spaces can haunt and heal us is the finest work of John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson and director Kogonada’s careersGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailBrady Corbet’s Oscar hopeful The Brutalist offers a somewhat skewed depiction of architectural intent, one where public demonstrations of genius and private catharses have an outsized impact on a building’s design. Grand gestures and hidden intentions make for good drama but physical space in The Brutalist is rendered secondary to psychological space – it’s a film about a great architect, not great architecture. For the latter, one must watch the Korean-American director Kogonada’s film Columbus.Early on in this gentle drama, Jin (John Cho) speaks of the renowned architect James Polshek’s belief in architecture as a “healing art” while looking at one of Polshek’s designs: the glass walkway of the Columbus regional mental health center. While Jin admires its faintly dilapidated beauty, it is unclear whether he believes that architecture can really heal us. But Kogonada most certainly does: his generosity of spirit and rigorous control of cinematic technique imbue Columbus with a quiet, aching humanity, demonstrating how spaces can haunt and heal us. Continue reading…

Architect who was once highly critical of King Charles is part of team that is one of five finalists for schemeThe shortlist of teams competing to design a national memorial to the late Queen Elizabeth II has been unveiled and includes an architect once highly critical of King Charles.Five finalists are in the running for what has been described as one of the most significant design initiatives in modern British history, in tribute to the UK’s longest-serving monarch. Continue reading…

Adrian James’s copper-clad, energy-generating new home on the outskirts of Oxford is a triumph of style and sustainabilityWe’re used by now to buildings that declare their greenness; that proudly display their timber construction or hemp panels or wind turbines for the world to see; that make an architectural story out of their care for the atmosphere. And why not. But a striking aspect of Copper Bottom, a new house by the architect Adrian James, is that, apart from being in the most literal sense coloured green, it gives little sense of its sustainability. It looks at first sight like a carefree exploration of built form – a WTF YOLO 3D doodle; a fun folly conceived with no particular thought for the environment.James once worked for the brilliantly original British postmodernist John Outram, since when he has been ploughing his own distinctive furrow in Oxford. He and his practice design housing, commercial and education buildings, single private houses, a yoga studio. Nearly 30 years ago he announced himself with a full-bodied, barrel-vaulted Thameside house in the city, with notes of ancient Egypt and warehouse construction, for himself and his wife, Sarah. Now, having raised a family there, they have built Copper Bottom for the next stage of their lives. It sits on the very edge of the city (a 15-minute bike ride from the centre), just where a lush part of Oxford’s green belt starts, with views back to the dreaming spires. Continue reading…