Architecture
From ballrooms to billets – the fate of our country houses and their owners in wartime
Judith Lewis focuses on how wives and daughters, left in charge of ancestral homes, coped with vandalism, dispossession and even ruin as a result of requisition in the second world war
Always second but actually invincible: Agrippa, by Robert Harris, reviewed
The Roman general’s inner life is a blank, as Harris admits – but filling it with memories of military campaigns and aqueduct-building doesn’t make for the liveliest story
What will the successful cities of the future look like?
Gabriella Bennett visits 11 new architectural projects around the world to examine how war, climate change and an ageing population may be influencing urban planners
Letters: Burnham is a master brand-builder
Telling stories Sir: As a filmmaker by training and a marketer by profession, I couldn’t agree more with your leading…
Are good people made by good surroundings, or the other way round?
Joad Raymond Wren examines utopian schemes through the centuries, from Plato’s Republic to Womyn’s land, and concludes that we should never stop challenging the status quo
The uprising against ugly cities
Arriving in Oslo, the Barcode District is unavoidable. It is so named because its blocks are laid out like dominos…
The mostly untold story of the brutalist Obama Presidential Center
A dozen years in the making, the $1 billion Obama Presidential Center had its public unveiling in Chicago today. It became…
How the office has come to haunt us
Should we hop on a call? Let’s touch base. Let’s take this offline. Let’s circle back to your last slide…
Get ready for the ugliest building in the City of London
The City of London is not noted for its beauty. Most great European cities expect their historic streets to retain…
The dirty secrets of the Royal Festival Hall
The Festival of Britain – that much mythologised moment of national renewal – is wheeled out every time the country…
The man who rescued the Notre-Dame
The Notre-Dame de Paris has had several close shaves down the years – even before the 2019 fire that nearly…
Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg
Albert Speer was treated leniently because he was softly-spoken, well-dressed and ‘much the most appealing’ of all the defendants, according to Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors
The genius of John Vanbrugh
Van’s genius, without Thought or Lecture, Is hugely turn’d to Architecture. Jonathan Swift’s dismissive jest has never been forgotten. It…
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…
