‘I was really angry at this fly,’ the artist Madelon Vriesendorp explains with a grin as I hold out my hand to shake hers, which is in a splint. ‘I jumped onto the bed to swat it, fell over and broke my wrist.’ Vriesendorp is showing me around her latest exhibition, which follows a long
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant because ‘that is the only place where you can’t see the damned thing’. Aviva Studios risks a similar fate. Designed by architects OMA as the permanent performance venue for the Manchester International
Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual architect yet still manages to wangle important building commissions. And he knows this. In his documentary for BBC Radio 4, Building Soul, where he examines what he calls the ‘blandemic’ in today’s architecture, he asks
The story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is hammered into us all from an early age. But its moral lessons obscure its more literal advice about building: skimping on materials is a false economy. It’s a lesson learned too late for schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). Who would’ve predicted that concrete made
Let’s indulge in some identity politics for a second: I am from Hong Kong, born as a subject of the last major colony of the British Empire, minority-ethnic, descended from Chinese refugees, now living here in exile. This summer, both the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain are presenting new displays that are meant to
As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a
