Architecture

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

On the cusp

‘A stalker who dressed a pillow “mannequin” in his ex’s nurse’s uniform, then sent her a picture, has been told he is “on the cusp” of jail,’ reported the Scottish edition of the Daily Star. ‘Sheriff Alastair Carmichael told Mark Glass: “I don’t think you understand just how serious this is. You are on the cusp of a custodial sentence.” ’ He’s not the only one on the cusp. Idris Elba is ‘on the cusp of landing the Holy Grail of film-star roles, James Bond,’ reported the Daily Telegraph in a splendidly mixed metaphor, as though the Holy Grail were a kind of giant marlin to land, and a marlin with

Stephen Bayley

City life

In its pomp, they used to say that what was good for General Motors, Detroit’s Medici, was good for America. Detroit was imperial. Like Rome, it stood for the whole. Michigan Avenue was like something from a Roman urbs: a decumanus maximus of this planned city that created and was enriched by the automobile. Then, like all empires, it began to collapse. By the time of my first visit 30 years ago, there were already clusters of youths on street corners picking their teeth with switchblades. All the signs of decay were present: boarded-up shops and discount stores. The Renaissance Center, a mirror-glass tubular tower whose form suggested a car’s

Thursday

Tanya Gold

High anxiety

Fenchurch is a restaurant that is scared of terrorists. It cowers at the top of 20 Fenchurch Street, a skyscraper which looks like an enormous and unfashionable Nokia 3120 mobile telephone; has it been designed explicitly to telephone for assistance? But who would it telephone? The Shard? I cannot imagine the Shard doing anything for anyone. It is 525 foot high blah and replaces a building that was only 299 foot high blah and so deserved to fail, being so mean and little; I never tire of the rampant Freudian anxiety of property developers and their architect slaves, because, like the phenomenon of the competitive super-yacht, it tells me they,

Thursday

William Cook & Stephen Bayley

Restoration drama

Yes   William Cook Rejoice! Rejoice! Fifty-four years after its destruction, Euston Arch has returned to Euston. Well, after a fashion. Four blocks from this lost portico, salvaged from a murky river bed in east London, have been deposited outside the station by Euston Arch Trust, a heroic pressure group that is campaigning to rebuild this much-lamented landmark. It’s only a tiny fragment of the original, but I can’t begin to tell you how much this small pile of rubble cheered me up. Wouldn’t it be terrific fun to reconstruct this splendid monument? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bring old buildings such as Euston Arch back to life? Even by

Martin Gayford

Eastern reflections

In his introductory remarks to the Afro–Eurasian Eclipse, one of his later suites for jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington remarked — this was in 1971 — that east and west were blending into one another, and everyone was in danger of losing his or her identity. Nowhere is it easier to observe that phenomenon than on the little island of Naoshima, in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, which I visited last month. Naoshima possesses sandy beaches and tranquil blue waters dotted with further islets stretching towards the horizon. But this is an especially heavenly spot for a relatively small and specialised, even eccentric, group of travellers. For more than two

Jonathan Meades

Dedicated follower of fascism?

The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor startling. Indeed they’re old hat. And it defies credibility that the authors of three recent books about this tainted genius were ignorant of what anyone with even the frailest interest in architects’ foibles and tastes has been aware of for years. Not that this has deterred them; nor has it deterred newspapers from filleting the books for supposedly sensational titbits. What next? The hot news that the cuckold Carlo Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover? That Jean Genet has been discovered to have been, you know, on the light-fingered

James Fenton

Moving pictures | 21 May 2015

About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The Spectator declares war on bad public art

Like peace, love and lemon-meringue pie, ‘public art’ seems unarguably attractive. Who but a philistine curmudgeon would deny the populace access to the immediate visual thrills and the enduring solace of beauty that the offer of public art seems to promise? Public art is surely a democratic benefit. Never mind that in the past century its most forceful expression was the grim and malignantly deceitful narratives of Soviet socialist realism, with their ruddy-faced, grinning and buxom tractor drivers disguising a more real reality of starvation, intolerance and torture. Public art is here to be enjoyed at a desolate piazza near you. And then you begin to think about it. Has

Thursday

Esther Freud

The long ordeal of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art

I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent in Suffolk — when news came in that his most famous architectural creation, The Glasgow School of Art, was on fire. My heart lurched. This was an unimaginable tragedy, not just for Glasgow, but for Britain. Students were weeping in the street. I struggled not to cry myself. Poor old Mac (as the Suffolk locals called him). He’d had enough bad luck already. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a student at the Glasgow School of Art in 1895 when a competition to design a new art school was announced. He

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Bish bash Bosphorus: Elif Shafak’s saga of love and death in Istanbul is crammed with incident on every page

If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his elephant in Istanbul in the 1500s, The Architect’s Apprentice might be suitable for you. My heart sank slightly when the review copy arrived: a 452-page brick by an Orange-Prize-shortlisted Turkish author and ‘global speaker’ who ‘blends western and eastern methods of storytelling’ and has 1.6 million Twitter followers. But I resolved to get caught up in the novel and did.You have to suspend all need for irony and modernity and latch on to Jahan, the Indian boy who is the central character. As a child Jahan stows away on the

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why Ofsted should be disbanded

Disband Ofsted Sir: Dennis Sewell’s damning indictment of Ofsted (‘Ofsted in the dock’, 13 December) stopped short of the logical conclusion of disbanding it, arguing instead that the chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, should be supported in his efforts to purge inspectors promoting the progressive educational agenda that the coalition inherited. We’ve been here before. Chris Woodhead was chief inspector for six years, and despite his best efforts concluded that his organisation had ‘become a part of the [progressive] establishment, and arguably the most lethal part…’. Wilshaw has been chief inspector for almost three years, and apparently is only just discovering the extent to which his inspectors are still promoting

Hugh Graham

Dallas, city of culture

When George W. Bush was outed as an artist, after a computer hacker uncovered his nude self-portraits, jaws dropped around the world. Could Cowboy George, a man whom even Kim Jong-il’s cronies dubbed a philistine, actually be a closet aesthete? This spring, at the first exhibition of his works in Dallas, he confessed: ‘There’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body.’ It shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Bush’s hometown of Dallas may be stereotyped as a cultural wasteland, synonymous with big oil, big hair and Wild West machismo, but it, too, has an artistic side the world is only now discovering. Take the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Rather

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?

The French for French-bashing is le French bashing. This verbally costive nation is at it once again, torpidly borrowing an approximately English expression rather than coining its own. Such bashing is not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon practice. There is indigenous bashing. At least there is Éric Zemmour, whose salutary Le Suicide français was published a couple of months ago. Its very first sentence declares that France is the sick man of Europe — which prompted Manuel Valls, little Hollande’s prime minister this week and a man who is not growing into that poisoned office, to take the bait, exhibit a preposterously thin skin and denounce the book twice in a few

Simon Heffer

Cambridge, showcase for modernism (and how costly it is to fix)

The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon it will be time for the revisions to be revised: it is 30 years since the new London: 2, for example. Aficionados have keenly awaited the Cambridgeshire volume, the latest in the series, because of the substantial new building undertaken by Cambridge University since Pevsner himself last catalogued it in the early 1970s (his first edition appeared in 1954). For most people the county is summarised by two buildings: Ely cathedral, ‘the ship of the fens’, and King’s College chapel. Both were admired by Pevsner, who reserved much of his

Thursday

Ellis Woodman

How Londoners can reclaim the River Thames

Last week, 539 apartments designed by Frank Gehry and Norman Foster were made available for off-plan purchase. This was heralded by simultaneous launches in London and Kuala Lumpur and a press release announcing Sting and Trudie Styler as early buyers. Battersea Power Station has stood unused for more than 30 years but after multiple failed attempts at redevelopment progress is now well under way towards its transformation into one of London’s most desirable addresses. Ultimately due to house 3,400 homes — only 15 per cent of which are set to be affordable — the project is emblematic of a far larger reclamation of London’s waterfront as a site for luxury

Colin Maccabe

To call this offering a book is an abuse of language

I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world war when New York supplanted Paris as the cultural capital of the world? One thinks of the Beats, of Dylan and Greenwich Village, of Sontag and Trilling. Well think again, for none of the above feature in this book at all. Indeed the first thing to be said is that to call this offering from Thames & Hudson a book is a real abuse of language. It has covers and inside those covers one finds text and image but the three essays that cover visual art, architecture and design and

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The only way is Essex University

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand monuments to learning but by the swaggering, leering one-liners of the global plutocracy. These are thoughts that come to mind on the occasion of Essex University’s 50th birthday, a much more interesting anniversary than it first (rather bleakly) sounds. It is the subject of an engaged and engaging booklet, Something Fierce, and an on-campus exhibition

Thursday

Andrew Barrow

Why prefabs really were fab

Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to manufacture half a million of them to ease the new housing emergency caused by enemy bombs and the continued growth of inner-city slums. He went on to claim that these easy-to-assemble, factory-made bungalows would be ‘far superior to the ordinary cottage’. Readers of this richly illustrated, hard-hitting little book will find that Churchill was right. The new prefab — an early prototype immediately went on show at the Tate Gallery, of all places — did not meet the approval of George Bernard Shaw, who called it ‘Heartbreak House’ and that

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The camera always lies

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music. But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s how architects see it. So photography makes better sense of architecture than any other medium does: there is something congruent between the fixed optical geometry of a camera and the way we perceive buildings. And because images are more readily accessible than travel to remote sites, everyone’s experience of world architecture is, at least initially,

Thursday

Alasdair Palmer

Michelangelo’s vision was greater even than Shakespeare’s

It is 450 years since the birth of William Shakespeare. The anniversary has been hard to avoid in this country, which is entirely appropriate. Shakespeare helped to shape not only our language but also our conception of character and our understanding of the human condition. Our experience of love, of facing death, of loss and of glory, contains echoes of Shakespeare, even if we hardly ever read him or see his plays. It is also 450 years since the death of Michelangelo. That anniversary has hardly been noticed here — although Michelangelo had as great an impact on visual arts in the West as Shakespeare has had on its literature.