Reading Time: 4 minutesI’m in a dollar store. I’m in a space for contemporary architecture. I’m in a dollar store space for contemporary architecture. There are products, but there is nothing to buy. I’m laughing, but I think I might be the punchline.

Reading Time: 4 minutesWalking through a city you assume of course that you are in a heart of civilisation, Deep in a metropolis surrounded by streets and buildings far away from nature. Forms and shapes that have a recognisable scales, significances and meaning:

Reading Time: 7 minutesThere is a video on YouTube of one of the lectures of the late Liverpool-born mathematician John Conway.[1] It starts in the lecture theatre at Princeton. We see him at the blackboard, where he is explaining to his students how

Reading Time: 3 minutesStatic caravans, a term that already embodies a kind of self-cancelling logic. Static like theatmosphere before a thunderstorm, where your hair stands on end as if standing within differentphysics. Static as in lighter than air, the balloon clinging to the

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe history of avant guard architecture is in part a search for a holy grail of multifunctional democratic space. Social condensers (as the Russian Constructivists called them), Cedric Price’s celebrated (though unbuilt) Fun Palace, Constant’s New Babylon – always looking

Reading Time: 7 minutes“We saw a picture of it printed in Domus, back to front,” says Howard Raggatt of Australian architects ARM. He’s talking about ARM’s design for the National Museum of Australia, which features a black copy of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye,

Reading Time: 7 minutesThere is nothing more perverse than a Design Museum. A place specifically given over to the display of things made for the ‘real world’ – things we would usually eat from, wear, sit on, drive or otherwise use. Here though,

Reading Time: 7 minutesIf this essay were a documentary, we would begin with a shot of the green-brown water of the river Thames lapping against the alginated stone embankment outside the House of Parliament. We would zoom out while fading to spliced footage

Reading Time: 5 minutesIt turns out that Francis Fukuyama – yes, that Francis Fukuyama – is quite the amateur carpenter who spends his down time making antique furniture. The American political scientist is best known for his essay The End of History? Published

Reading Time: 2 minutesTo see Venturi’s original manuscript, all yellow paper, typed hand written, cut up and taped together is a text that seems to be both shredded and composed, as if placing words and sentences together were an act of composition or

Reading Time: 3 minutes“Everyone”, said Ars?ne Wenger in response to an Alex Ferguson jibe “thinks they have the most beautiful wife at home”. And therein lies the problem. What on earth is beauty? Obviously, as Wenger suggests, it’s relative. Your idea of beauty

Reading Time: 3 minutesThere are a number of theories as to why Britain missed out on capital M Modernism. Some say it was because our industrial revolution happened early, others cite a British culture of political moderation, while more point to the overbearing

Reading Time: 4 minutesIt’s that nagging sensation that pervades what we vaguely call ‘modern life’. It’s there, somewhere in the background like a dull distracting hum or sheathing us with an imperceptible film separating us from the world. It’s that feeling that somehow

Reading Time: 4 minutesStaring out of the floor to ceiling window the city is laid out before you. The soft lights of your hotel room appear reflected in the glazing like UFOs in the darkening sky. Your own reflection floats like a ghost

Reading Time: 7 minutesSometimes its only when you’re a long way from home that you realise what home really is. And there’s nowhere less like home – wherever you live – than Antarctica. Antarctica’s remoteness and relatively pristine state make it a special

Reading Time: 6 minutesFour years before Mies van der Rohe arrived in Chicago, America’s Most Wanted Man was gunned down in an alleyway after leaving a movie theatre with a woman on each arm. John Dillinger was the dashing heartthrob of Chicago’s gangland.

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhat His Holiness can teach us about blue-screen thinking That the Vatican has struck a deal with YouTube, launching its own channel earlier this week, should not come as a surprise. The church has always been a technological organisation. From the tips

Reading Time: 6 minutesArchitects appear with an unlikely frequency in movies given their lowly public profile. Here’s a selection: Tom Selleck in 3 Men And A Baby. Paul Newman in The Towing Inferno. Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal, Liam Neeson in Love Actually,

Reading Time: 8 minutesThere is a story – most likely apocryphal – of a customs officer at the Hong Kong border. He stops someone crossing from mainland China, opens the suitcase and finds an array of Rolex watches. Investigating further, he opens up

Reading Time: 3 minutesSpace has an unimpeachable reality.  But if we scan a history of how space has been drawn we see just how fluid and varied conceptions of space have been. A brief history of how we have drawn space from, say,

Reading Time: 6 minutesThere’s a scene in Scary Movie where James van der Beek, better known as Dawson from Dawson’s Creek, pokes his head through a window into a teenagers bedroom, looks around confused and says “Wrong set”. Fans would get the reference

Reading Time: 18 minutesThe story of A Clockwork Jerusalem is a story of a nation’s struggle to come to terms with modernity. It’s a story of attempts to resolve the inequalities, violence and fear embedded in the industrial city, of the need for