Architecture

Houses of ill repute

Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer. The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if you are lucky. And the worst influences our behaviour: a riot with burning Renaults, if you live in a French banlieue. But, as a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection suggests, architecture may also, in one way or another, affect our health. At ground level, this is quite obvious. Damp, foul air, extreme temperatures, bad

Living the highly expensive life

It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une machine à habiter’). But it was a visit to a masterpiece of his great rival among modernist architects — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — that brought home to me how literally accurate that celebrated aphorism was. His Villa Tugendhat at Brno is one of the great monuments of early modernism. To run smoothly, however, this luxurious dwelling required almost as much machinery as a small ocean-liner. The building has been restored with rigorous scholarship to look exactly as it did when its first owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, moved

Putting our House in order

My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member of its management committee and that gave me, an infant, the right to roam freely the four floors — including its vast basement — as I waited for him to finish meetings. I remember seeing Hebrew writing on a plaque on the top floor. There were mezuzahs on doors, respectfully preserved by the Muslim elders. I played with my brother on the second floor amid the dusty ebony pews left over from the mosque’s days as a French Huguenot church. European Judaism, Christianity and Islam were woven into the historical

Academic questions

What is the Royal Academy? This question set me thinking as I wandered through the crowds that celebrated the opening of the RA’s new, greatly extended building. After all, there is nothing else quite like this institution anywhere else in the world. It was a terrific party: a mêlée of artists, journalists, politicians and media types such as I have not seen since the inauguration of Tate Modern 18 years ago (with the unexpected addition of DJs and high-volume music). The whole gang was there, and rightly so. This is a significant addition to the amenities of London, including, among other things, two new suites of galleries at 6 Burlington

The greenhouse effect

The glasshouses at Kew Gardens are so popular that they can be quite unbearably busy at weekends. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re beautiful structures and the plants they shelter are so marvellous that they deserve the attention they get, whether from botany nerds, schoolchildren, or millennials dressed for Instagram and posing for selfies in the steamy leafy heat. But for the past five years, the biggest member of the Kew family has been closed to the public. Hidden under an enormous awning that the botanic gardens boasts could have covered three Boeing 747s (one of those area-the-size-of-Wales facts that mean very little), the Temperate House has been undergoing a

The evanescence of everything

Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and sparkling seas — but not buildings. He was scarcely a topographical artist — an impressionist Canaletto, even if Venice was among his themes. Nonetheless, Monet & Architecture at the National Gallery is an intriguing experience. Before I saw it, the suspicion crossed my mind that this was the solution to a conundrum that must puzzle many galleries. Namely, how to put together another Monet exhibition without it being the same as all the others? An institution such as the National Gallery could not just borrow a lorry-load of Monets and

The highs and hellish lows of superstructuralism

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of British military field hospitals. Ten times more soldiers were dying from diseases like cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Shocked, the War Office commissioned 49-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design the world’s first prefabricated hospital. Components were manufactured to Brunel’s specifications in Gloucestershire then rushed to Turkey for erection. He took the commission on 16 February 1855 and fewer than five months later, the new Renkioi Hospital could accept 300 patients (2,200 by March 1856). Infection rates collapsed. Nightingale called it ‘magnificent’. The new architecture of prefab had triumphed.

Rats in the ballroom

At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively produced, replete with beautiful photographs, a text as undemanding as the tinkling notes of a cocktail-bar pianist, and the whole thing massively heavy. It is a beautiful — and heavy — book, with fine photographs by Luke White. But what distinguishes it is the skill and acuity with which James Stourton has written the commentary, making it a serious and engrossing work of history. His text takes the form of an introductory essay on the changing nature of diplomacy over the centuries, a model of elegant concision, followed by the

Turkish delights | 30 November 2017

Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the crumbling grandeur of Count Ignatiev’s Russian embassy summer villa on the upper shores of the Bosphorus to the remote and fog-bound manor houses of the Black Sea. But the Palace Lady’s Summerhouse is much more than a beautifully illustrated book: it’s about the people who lived — and live — in these buildings, and a portrait of the vanishing worlds they represent. We meet the gentlemanly descendants of a dynasty of grand viziers who quizzically watch the maritime traffic of the modern world passing by their ancestral waterside palace. There

More secrets and symbols

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In a world where a quarter of people read literally no books in any given year, can we give each other a break on this kind of thing? If you found Angels and Demons good fun, thoroughly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code (as I unironically did), but despised Inferno for the worthless piece of rat doodah that it was, then the good news is that Brown is back on form here. Origin is brisk, fun and filled with adorably pointless Wikipedia paragraphs; and what’s at stake is endearingly grandiose. Here, the

The old ways

I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look to them but are in fact brand new. His Jacob Rees-Mogg attire — well-cut chalk-stripe suit and immaculate tie — sets him apart from the others in the room, who are mostly architects and architectural fellow travellers like me. We don’t dress like that. But George Saumarez Smith is indeed an architect, a very good one. He just happens to be a trad. A traditionalist, mostly a classicist. And now is very much the time of the architectural trads. They have crept up on us. There’s a revival going on,

Perception vs objective reality

I hate to tell you this, but every time you watch television you are being duped. In fact there are only three accurate things you will ever see on television. These are the colours red, green and blue. Each pixel on a screen can transmit three colours only. If blue alone is illuminated, the screen is blue. And it really is blue. But TV yellow is a big fat lie. It looks yellow. But it isn’t really yellow. It’s a mixture of red and green light which hacks our optical perception so we think we are seeing yellow. That’s because humans, indeed all higher apes, are mostly trichromats. We have

The Bilbao effect

Twenty years ago I wrote of the otherwise slaveringly praised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: I’m in a minority of, apparently, one. It strikes me as a consummate gimmick… a fantastically elaborate and rather wearisome joke. Has mankind spent all these centuries perfecting Euclidean geometry and orthogonal engineering in order to have it overthrown by massively expensive crazy cottages clad in titanium? Apparently mankind has. So much for the building. What of the ‘Bilbao effect’, an epithet that I am accused of having coined (I can’t remember, but it’s inappropriate because there is, typically, no effect). Even before Frank Gehry’s earth-shattering masterpiece was finished, word was out and post-industrial cities on

Frills and furbelows

Over the winter of 1859–60, a handsome young man could be seen patrolling the shores of the Gulf of Messina in a rowing boat, skimming the water’s surface with a net. The net’s fine mesh was not designed for fishing, and the young man was not a Sicilian fisherman. He was the 25-year-old German biologist Ernst Haeckel from Potsdam searching for minute plankton known as Radiolaria. In February he wrote excitedly to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, that he had caught 12 new species in a single day — ‘among them the most charming little creatures’ — and hoped to make it a full century before leaving. Haeckel had a degree

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing about theatre and opera. This coffee-table whopper, weighing in at just under a kilo, dazzles: Michael Coveney’s text is even better than Peter Dazeley’s remarkable photographs. And in a luminous foreword, Mark Rylance sets out the not-so-obvious difference between theatre and cinema: ‘In a theatre you need to hear the truth. In a cinema you need to see it.’ Most of the theatre audience can’t see the actor’s eyes, and have to rely on hearing emotion in the voice and, to a lesser extent, detecting emotion in body language. Hence

Cathedral of creation

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it properly, not even at the evening parties I’ve been to under Dippy-the-Dinosaur, until now. I visited the new and refurbished Hintze Hall and it was a revelation. The thing that strikes most visitors is that there isn’t a dinosaur any more — Dippy is on tour — and he’s been replaced by Hope, who is a) a blue whale, b) female and c) genuine (the dinosaur was fake). Swings and roundabouts. We have lost a dinosaur, but we’ve gained an entirely new perspective

Epiphanic

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported the architectural listing of the Isle of Dogs storm water pumping station. ‘I’d been looking for that,’ I said patiently (I thought). ‘The listing is not the point.’ A reader had sent the paper to me because of the strange language used by John Outram, the architect of the Grade II* building, put up between 1986 and 1988: ‘Decoration is the origin and essence of architecture. It can mediate, in the theatre of a built room or a big city, the epiphany of a meaning. I aimed to invent that

Towering extravagance

The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying out for a big spike of concrete, steel and glass filled with a mix of superluxury hotel, ultraprime apartments and loads of speculative offices right above London Bridge station, with an expensive viewing gallery as a sop to public accessibility. Had it never happened, we would not regard the air it did not fill as a waste of atmosphere. The Shard is merely a gigantic financial speculation, majority-funded by Qatari money. And yet it is a very good piece of architecture. Its veteran Italian architect, Renzo Piano, succeeded in designing

To buy cheap art, buy architecture

Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise uninhabitable, such as Nelson’s Column or the Royal Opera House. There are perhaps only 2,500 Grade I listed buildings in England in which you can feasibly live: these include Buckingham Palace and the Sutherland gaff. Eighteen years ago, when we had twins and decided to move out of London, my wife discovered a four-bedroom apartment in the roof of a Robert Adam house a mile outside the M25. To our astonishment, it was barely more expensive than ordinary housing of similar size nearby. I recently asked my neighbour, an economist,

Building block | 8 June 2017

Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on the Mersey. It’s a city of scale, drama, melodrama, tragedy and comedy. Not to mention rich and poor. And often all these effects are simultaneous. No other British city has a similarly contrary architectural character: superb, shabby, romantic, melancholy, proud and mean. You cannot be in Liverpool and not be affected by its buildings. I grew up there and long before I knew what ‘design’ meant, Liverpool had taught me to see — as well as to feel the deadly weight of history. It’s an architectural education. But Liverpool has