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The Royal Academy's 2023 Architecture Room celebrates 'the art of making and the hand-made'

2023-06-14T17:39:00-04:00

The Peter Barber-curated Royal Academy of Arts summer Architecture Room has opened in London, featuring an exhibition focusing on the role of craftsmanship in architecture.

The room plays into the 2023 Summer Exhibition's greater theme put forth by academician and curator David Remfry, who says his focus was inspired by the famous adage to “Only Connect” as taken from novelist E.M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece Howard’s End.

A selection of studio models, drawings, maquettes, sketches, and other objects comprise the Architecture Room exhibition, which is on view until August 20th in the RA’s Burlington House main gallery.

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The 2022 Soane Medalist Barber previously stated his intentions of “focusing on the art of making and the hand-made within the design process, which can often be overlooked in the digital age." The works selected, therefore, demonstrate “[an] experimental, provocati...

UK Housing Secretary Michael Gove throws his hat behind the country's traditionalism movement

2023-01-05T15:50:00-05:00

The UK’s housing chief is throwing his name into the contentious ongoing debate surrounding the role and perception of traditionalism and classical architecture in the country’s design culture and academia.

The Architects’ Journal has details on Secretary Michael Gove’s foreword to a report authored by critic Ike Ijeh for a right-wing think tank that calls for the establishment of a “School of Place” and other educational changes that would “revive” traditionalism “from the annals of obscurity to which contemporary architecture education has unfairly consigned it.”

Gove tied the cause to the country’s housing crisis while also welcoming calls for the elevation of classicism in university curricula without expressly stating that it should be mandated in either educational Part of the RIBA-administered licensure process, stating: “There is no silver bullet to solve the housing crisis, nor to transform British towns and cities overnight or instantaneously deliver a workforce imbued wit...

Soane Medalist Peter Barber on some possible fixes to the UK's housing crisis

2022-11-11T11:22:00-05:00

There is no housing shortage. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country which have become depopulated because of economic decline – in the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the solution to the housing crisis isn’t building tons of homes. It’s about reviving the economy in those places, launching a massive retrofit campaign, and bringing people back.”

“We could end the housing crisis overnight, if we wanted to,” Barber told Oliver Wainwright in a recent interview, referring to the private grab on council housing that has developed unabated since the Thatcher administration's Right-to-Buy laws came into effect in 1980. “We should introduce private sector rent controls, halt the selling of council houses under right to buy, and build 150,000 council homes a year funded by direct taxation."

Peter Barber: reinventing affordable housing in London

2018-10-10T15:42:00-04:00

[...] Peter Barber, one of the most original architects working today. Over the past decade he has built a reputation for his ingenious reinventions of traditional house types and his ability to craft characterful chunks of city out of unpromising sites. [...] He is a master of humane high-density, designing that rare thing: new housing that feels in tune with the grain of London, in the form of neither alienating slabs nor tacky towers, without resorting to pastiche.

The Guardian's architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, has nothing but praise for the award-winning firm Peter Barber Architects, a small practice that seeks to integrate social activism ideals when designing better, and more humane, housing for London.

Holmes Road Studio, a whimsical housing project for homeless people, was the overall winner of the New London Awards in 2016. Photo: Peter Barber Architects.

"When you visit one of Barber’s projects, you get a sense that it is a fragment of a much bigger urban idea," writes Wainwright. "There is an indication that housing, as the physical stuff that makes streets, might offer more than just private shelter behind the front door."