Architecture
A Spectator poll: What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
Slavoj Zizek Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from…
Labour’s war on heritage
Britain’s heritage is slowly going up in smoke. Medlock Mill was Manchester’s oldest standing textile mill until it burnt down…
Unesco are idiots
Of all the moronic decisions made by cultural organisations over the past 50 years, probably the most insulting and retrograde…
The Romans would have known that AI can’t replace architects
Architects are thrilled about AI, confident that it will take us into an exciting new world at the flick of…
The triumph of classical architecture
It is very hard to imagine the University of Oxford ever constructing a modernist building again. This is the significance…
An unheroic hero: Ginster, by Siegfried Kracauer, reviewed
When Kracauer’s protagonist is finally conscripted in the first world war, he starves himself to ‘general physical debility’ and is sent to ‘peel potatoes against the foe’
Centuries of cross-currents between Christianity and Islam
Elizabeth Drayson celebrates a long and fruitful exchange of views about the arts, sciences, literature and mathematics
A gallery that refuses to dumb-down
The DNA of Dulwich Picture Gallery is aspirational, in the sincerest sense. Opening in 1817 when private collections were still…
How the railways shaped modern culture
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to…
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Social, moral, architectural and linguistic problems collide in this gem of a novel set in lightly altered contemporary Tokyo
The podcast of the summer
The cover painting for The Specialist, a new podcast from Sotheby’s, looks like a scene from Mad Men. The people…
The architects redesigning death
Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western…
The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability
The more complex the infrastructure, the more liable it is to break down – as was recently apparent in the blackout that brought Madrid and Lisbon to a standstill in April
V&A’s new museum is a defiant stand against the vandals
In last week’s Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to ‘get these works out’. There’s an…
Architecture has hit a nadir at the Venice Biennale
Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty,…
Decent redesign, ravishing rehang: the new-look National Gallery reviewed
A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing…
Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name
The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed…
Was Sir John Soane one of the first modernists?
Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to…
The National Trust’s plans for Clandon Park are a travesty
In April 2015, a fire raged through Clandon Park, destroying much of the 18th-century Palladian mansion’s prized interiors. Contrary to…
Britain’s shopfronts are a national embarrassment
A few weeks ago, a couple of men with ladders started work on a former bridal boutique at the end…
A classy potboiler – but it’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed
The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of…
The architectural provocations of I.M. Pei
When first considering architects for the new Louvre in 1981, Emile Biasini, the project’s head, liked that I.M. Pei was…
Letters: Where to find the best negroni
Free thinking Sir: Your leading article (‘Article of faith’, 14 December) appears to have forgotten the connection between rationalism and…
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains terrible art – but is filled with magic
For a press tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the Church of the Resurrection, the…
What will the cities of the future look like?
Will they be subterranean, to escape extreme heat; or float in the sky, to avoid overcrowding; or abolish streets entirely, like the Line, now under construction in Saudi Arabia?
