Stephen Bayley

Art has ceased to be beautiful or interesting — but we are more obsequious than ever to artists

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by…

‘Combs, Hair Highway’, 2014, by Studio Swine

Luxury isn’t the opposite of poverty but the opposite of vulgarity - but don’t tell the V&A

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…

The miracle of modern flight, by a 747 pilot with a poet’s sensibility

18 April 2015 9:00 am

With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about…

Cars are our cathedrals

18 April 2015 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley hails the automobile – a miracle of technical and artistic collaboration – and mourns its demise

A reliable escape: Mikrolimano

Grim, generous, decaying and hip: the paradoxical charms of Athens

7 March 2015 9:00 am

My first visit to Athens as a student gave me a set of impressions that the present crisis has only…

Crazy horses: Andy Scott’s Kelpies at sunset

The Spectator declares war on bad public art

28 February 2015 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art

Yoko Ono performing ‘Cut Piece’, where her outfit is cut down to her underwear by predatory snipping scissors

From classical to post-modern: a beginner’s guide

7 February 2015 9:00 am

My career at school and after was greatly enhanced by a series of books called The Bluffer’s Guide to….These gave…

The art of Coke

7 February 2015 9:00 am

The Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle is 100 years old. Stephen Bayley salutes a design classic

A dressing room in London designed by Nicky Haslam, inspired by Dorothy Draper’s lobby at the Carlyle Hotel in New York

An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…

Conservator Johanna Puisto dusts the cast of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ post-conservation, November 2014

The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence

22 November 2014 9:00 am

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…

The many faces of Essex: it was the architects’ intention to create ‘Something Fierce’ — a designed environment that was actively stimulating. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ESSEX UNIVERSITY'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY BROCHURE

The only way is Essex University

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations

Antiquity 2’, 2009–11

Jeff Koons's latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel

25 October 2014 9:00 am

Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager…

Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity

25 October 2014 9:00 am

If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…

The camera always lies

27 September 2014 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley explores how the camera shapes our relationship with architecture

Shinkansen: one of the most powerful symbols of modern Japan

My addiction to the bullet train

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley explains why he has become addicted to Japan’s Shinkansen

Valentine typewriter, 1969

Ettore Sottsass, Jnr: more than just a funny name

17 May 2014 9:00 am

Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures.  More…

Shigeru Ban’s Cardboard Cathedral, Christchurch

You want a glitzy new cultural centre in Backofbeyondistan? Don’t call Shigeru Ban

17 May 2014 9:00 am

Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite…

The best exhibition of architecture I have ever experienced

1 March 2014 9:00 am

Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse…

The Seagram Building, Park Avenue, New York

The man who gave the world (but not London) the glass skyscraper

15 February 2014 9:00 am

Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred…

The most inspiring gift for your child this Christmas

14 December 2013 9:00 am

One of the big differences between Frank Lloyd Wright and me is that, when he was nine, his mother gave…

Renaissance view of the Ideal City: detail from a painting attributed to Francesco Giorgio Martini

Dear Simon Jenkins, please stop moaning about developers

26 October 2013 9:00 am

When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and…

Is Richard Rogers still a rebel?

27 July 2013 9:00 am

‘Lounge suit’ is normally a reliable signifier of supine gentility. But there it was on the invitation to Richard Rogers’s…

Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review

6 July 2013 9:00 am

Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…