Architecture
Ships of heaven
In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our…
Desperate remedies
One of Adrian Tinniswood’s recent books, The Long Weekend, is a portrait of country house life in the interwar years.…
Sent to Coventry
The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…
High Jencks
An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets,…
Should it stay or should it go?
There are many examples of beautiful old buildings being knocked down in favour of undistinguished new ones. But not everything can be preserved in aspic, says Martin Gayford
Talking to a brick wall at the National Trust
Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is.…
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…
The disgraceful decision to remove Liverpool’s heritage status
Unesco has cancelled the ‘World Heritage Status’ of the Necropolis at Memphis and the Giza Pyramid because a Radisson Blu…
Letters
Excess demand Sir: Liam Halligan (‘The house mafia’, 26 June) treats us to an exposé of the shoddy products of…
Blockheads
Why is modern architecture so ugly?
Affronted
The problem with London’s fake facades
The weekend cottage in the woods
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
From temples to labyrinths
At a certain point, the critic Robert Hughes once noted, at the heart of American cities churches began to be…
Home improvement
Squatting, gutting and retrofitting – and a lesson from India: Stuart Jeffries looks at the future of British architecture
The imitation game
Closely inspect No. 23 Leinster Terrace, Bayswater and you might notice the house has no letter box. Push at the…
Sold down the river
The roots of the Southbank Centre’s current crisis stretch back to before the pandemic, says Oliver Basciano
High culture on the hill
With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always…
Trump should build to last
Will the government finally stop giving the concrete finger to popular taste by erecting ugly, expensive and unsustainable buildings with…
From cartoons to stage design: the genius of Osbert Lancaster
‘Bigger,’ said Sir Osbert Lancaster when asked the difference between his work for the page and for the stage. ‘Definitely…
The man who built Britain’s first skyscraper
In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish…
Geoff Dyer on the poetry of motels
It’s to be expected. You take photographs in order to document things — Paris in the case of Eugène Atget…
‘Bolection’ and how the language of architecture was moulded
A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful…
How Camilla’s grandfather helped popularise the architecture Prince Charles detests
Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture…
It’s ugliness, not beauty, that spurs us to action
Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s…
Notre Dame is an architectural nullity
Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of…
