The RIBA Plan of Work
… has been a useful guide in steering the profession to provide clear, accurate and timely advice. The new version is more driven by external political events, rather than the independent practical concerns of the profession.
Grenfell Tower: A Tragedy
“From blaming the deaths from the Grenfell Tower fire on the London Fire Brigade it’s only a small step to blaming the residents for not leaving the burning building quickly enough”, says Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing
Milton’s Paradise Regained
If we are to build a new city, then Milton Keynes represents the experiential cornerstone. It symbolises the kind of bold, creative masterplanning that we desperately need but haven’t seen the like of since those crazy days of the 1960s.
Book Bites: Peter Magyar’s Pen Zen Diaries
At its simplest, this book will teach you to draw and to learn from the process; with simple line studies and ink renderings. “Architects,” he says, “should aspire to reflect and invent the best of the present, and weigh its value in the future”.
The World Cities Culture Report
The report recognises that revitalising and capitalising on a city’s cultural life plays out differently in vastly contrasting contexts.
A Chinese Utopia?
Review by Pierre Shaw [ Oct 2016] Shenzhen is the city of miraculous conception, born from nothing and yet emerging now as one of the planet’s most ferociously rapid urban developing city. From humble border town beginnings just 35 years ago, Shenzhen has thrown itself onto the world stage projecting its population from 300,000 to 12 – 15 million (no-one seems to know the exact figures). It is yet another step in China’s march...
Church on the Beach
Austin Williams | 7 April 2016 From Nantes to Naples, Bruge to Budapest, many key European cities have churches at their centre. Regardless of denomination, the centrality of these churches has tended to convey a certain historic gravitas, dignity and authority to the civic sphere. Originally built as bastions of power, tradition and religious dogma, churches have survived, in many instances, as the genius loci of urban space. Recall...
Wang Shu. Who?
Wang used his reclusive decade to reinvent himself as ‘a scholar, a craftsman, and an architect, in that order’. He emerged as a self-professed member of the literati: Chinese intellectuals who used painting and poetry to display their erudition and superior cultivated status.
Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy
– by Rozie Saunders – In October of 2010, Ai Weiwei filled the turbine hall at the Tate Modern with 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. In April 2011, he was arrested by the Chinese government and held at a secret location in solitary confinement for 81 days. His passport was confiscated for four years and not returned until July, this year. For the first time since Sunflower Seeds, Ai Weiwei has been able...
Playing Rough
Review by Matt Bloomfield | 01 August 2015 This summer in London has seen the opening of two exhibitions, both set against a backdrop of brutalism and with a pronounced vein of playfulness. The RIBA Gallery is currently occupied by The Brutalist Playground, an interactive installation created by architecture and design collective du jour- Assemble, in collaboration with artist Simon Terrill. Meanwhile, the Hayward Gallery on the...
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