Cutty Sark wins award as worst new building in Britain

2012-09-13T13:37:00-04:00

The architects, Grimshaw, have taken something delicate and beautiful and surrounded it with a building that looks like a 1980s bus station. Clumsy and ineptly detailed, their new glass greenhouse around the Cutty Sark totally ruins her thrilling lines, obscures much of her exquisite gilding and cynically forces anyone who actually wants to see her to pay their £12 and go inside.

A neatly choreographed landscape of British power

2012-04-27T17:22:00-04:00

As a measure of the influence of all these ships, one need only look at the cities in which these museums are sited: London, Portsmouth, Southampton, Belfast, Bristol. All have been shaped – literally as well as metaphorically – by their seafaring pasts

Steve Rose writes about a trio of museums celebrating Britain's nautical history; The Cutty Sark conservation project, the Mary Rose Museum and Southampton's SeaCity.

The first, a newly restored Cutty Sark can be found at its new home in Greenwich, designed by Grimshaw Architects. Although some decried the fact that the ship is no longer a ship, afloat, a combination of the demands of preservation and a need to earn a profit led Grimshaw Architects to raise the ship three meters up in the air and enclose it in a glass skirt/ceiling. The later two museums have been designed by Wilkinson Eyre and are dedicated to Henry VIII's famed flagship and Southampton's Titanic connections, respectively.

Archinect - News

Cutty Sark wins award as worst new building in Britain

A neatly choreographed landscape of British power