Archinect - News

Rowan Moore: UK architects should look elsewhere for council housing inspiration

2024-11-25T17:59:00-05:00

In Britain, as our government has promised, we’re going to have a “council housing revolution”, the building of as yet unknown numbers of homes at genuinely affordable rents, a return to policies of 50 and more years ago in order to address the well-known housing crisis. Which is welcome. Luckily there are, close at hand, outstanding examples of how this might be done, in cities and countries on the continent of Europe.

Moore points to Vienna, the city known for its ambitious development model for social housing, and Barcelona as two examples of what he says is a healthy "willingness to experiment" to be applied back home in the UK. The new Labour Party government has promised to usher in a "revolution" in council housing to deliver the up to 100,000 new homes needed per year to match current needs that have been made worse for years by bad policies and a lack of funding.

The same set of issues are plaguing efforts back across the pond in New York City, where Moore's American counterpart Michael Kimmelman recently considered some "radical" alternatives being pursued as part of NYCHA's complicated new plans.

Rowan Moore reviews new 'Difficult Sites' exhibition on challenging architectural parameters

2024-10-22T12:02:00-04:00

This small but rewarding show is a celebration of architectural skill and ingenuity, spurred on by whatever complexities might arise. Its exhibits include models and drawings supplied by contemporary practices, and taken (albeit, regrettably, only as reproductions) from RIBA’s collections. Some projects seek to soar above the mucky stuff. Others embrace the difficulties, making them into an occasion to create something that would never otherwise have come into being.

Speaking to the more than 20 building projects selected for the show, Moore added: "The qualities of thought on display are as relevant as ever, as the physical demands of climate emergency, and the challenges of providing new housing on a restricted supply of land, bring a whole new level of difficulty to bear. In these circumstances, design is not a luxury but a necessity. It’s beyond the scope of the RIBA exhibition to propose how these vaster challenges can be met, but it demonstrates creative intelligence that can be applied to more than the occasional delightful home."

If you're feeling up to the challenge, 'Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds', which opened on October 11th, will remain on view until March 25th, 2025 at the RIBA Architecture Gallery in London.

David Chipperfield on Fundación RIA and regional planning efforts in northern Spain

2024-06-27T19:54:00-04:00

A strength of Galicia, Chipperfield believes, is the extent to which technocratic versions of modernity have passed it by. “When we were growing up, we sort of knew what progress was. It was silver and shiny. Now we’re not so sure."

In a new interview with Rowan Moore, last year’s Pritzker winner David Chipperfield details his work in Galicia, Spain. In this seaside locale, he says, he’s found a restored sense of "normality" after relocating his life and family there for the summertime beginning in 2020. From there, he established his Fundación RIA, a "little research group" that has been instrumental in helping guide a territorial plan with aims that can be applied to many core issues (a lack of transportation options, livelihood in city centers, and disused structures) plaguing other small cities in the EU and North America.

Rowan Moore picks his Stirling Prize top contenders for 2024

2024-06-04T12:53:00-04:00

The big beasts of London’s Elizabeth line and King’s Cross redevelopment loom large, but newly announced regional contenders for this year’s prize should include a classy Cambridge dining hall, an all-timber office block and a wheelchair-friendly rural retreat

While the official announcement of the annual Stirling Prize for the best new building in the UK is still months away (find the results here in October), architecture critic Rowan Moore just published his customary hot take on the contenders that have been released so far.

Picking from a field of well over 100 RIBA regional award winners, Moore acknowledged the importance of high-profile London megaprojects, such as King’s Cross and the Elizabeth Line, and praised lesser-known but worthy designs, including Níall McLaughlin's Auckland Castle, the Waugh Thistleton-led Black & White Building, the Homerton College dining hall by Feilden Fowles, and Clementine Blakemore's Wraxall Yard.

The thoughtful design for a London elder care facility by Mæ took home last year's Stirling Prize top honor.

Rowan Moore pleas to end the time-wasting for Glasgow’s lost Mackintosh library rebuild

2024-05-15T12:05:00-04:00

Much though the school’s director Penny Macbeth insists that “our commitment is not diminished in any way shape or form”, an implication of their current approach is that the building’s renewal has to be justified in terms of regeneration and tourism. It seems to reopen the question whether the rebuild should happen at all. Lacking here is a conviction that the building must be brought back, whether or not it’s good for business on Sauchiehall Street.

Moore also claims “the responsibility to bring back a national treasure should not be theirs alone” (meaning the school’s) in support of his view that setting up an SPV for development would be, for now, the best way to go in order to meet the original promises issued in 2018.

Next Saturday (May 25th) marks the tenth anniversary of the first devastating 2014 fire. A new insurance dispute is further delaying the process even after The Glasgow School of Art announced a second tender for the proposed restoration project could come by the end of next month.

Mecanoo revives Scotland’s past into a new source of community pride

2024-04-08T17:26:00-04:00

Mecanoo has shared the news of its completed transformation of the Perth Museum in central Scotland.

The three-year construction yields 37,700 square feet worth of new public space inside of the Edwardian-style former City Hall that serviced the community from 1914 on. A specially carved Vennels-inspired intervention connects the two separate halls, framed by two new portals made from Black Isle timber and finished with a bronze casing.

Image credit: Greg Holmes Photography

Visitors will be welcomed into the brightly-lit new Main Hall archives space by a dramatic oak box container for the mythical returned Scottish Stone of Destiny. The adjacent Lesser Hall is thereafter recreated as a new communal space with larger windows and replete with a café and events venue.

Image credit: Greg Holmes Photography

This creates new panoramic views of the St. Johns Kirk church outside. Artifacts taken from the Jacobite period are on display within, including the silver broadsword used by Bonnie Pr...

Rowan Moore declares an aversion to Heatherwick’s London BT Tower hospitality makeover

2024-02-27T20:05:00-05:00

Its sale, for £275m, by BT to a hotel group, if it gives the tower a secure future, is welcome. I’m more troubled by the reports that the designer Thomas Heatherwick is to “repurpose” the building. His past work shows that he’s not one to leave well alone, but rather festoon structures with over-sized flower-pots and look-at-me swirling shapes. One can only hope that he discovers some restraint. The BT Tower is already an icon. It’s perfect. Let it be.

Readers will remember the critic's jabs at Heatherwick last fall after the publication of his new treatise on architecture and mental health, wherein Moore declared “an outbreak of shallow wannabe Gaudís” will follow in tow should the call-to-action be adopted.

That provocation isn't the first or even second time Moore has harshed the Vessel designer's creative schemes for the capital. In its defense, Heatherwick Studio has yet to detail any of the architectural extravagances Moore is lamenting after the project's February 22nd announcement.

Previously on Archinect: London’s BT Tower to be converted into a hotel by Heatherwick following MCR purchase

The conservation group C20 Society has offered its support for the £275 million project. If history is any guide, MCR's previous re-use of the TWA Hotel at JFK should steer the project away from any gauche gesturing and towards the Swinging London era anachronisms Moore champions nostalgically as "hopeful futurism."

...

Rowan Moore on how Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo plans to use the 2024 Olympics as the catalyst for a greener ‘City of Lights’

2024-01-02T13:46:00-05:00

She wants to make it a paradise of low pollution and healthy living, as friendly to pedestrians and bicycles as can be, with new developments planned to promote community life. This is a long-term endeavour, going back to Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delanoë, who was mayor from 2001 to 2014, but the Olympics have been enlisted to give it a boost. In the face of what Rabadan calls “a lot of political resistance”, the Olympics “gave us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation we need”.

Surveying the broadscale urban greening and pedestrianization program of 2023 ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development laureate Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Rowan Moore declares the slate of changes “absolutely right” for Parisians while admitting that her “rhetoric has a way of outrunning reality.”

The Guardian critic also reversed his colleague Oliver Wainright’s praise of the ‘15-minute city’ concept developed by Hidalgo’s advisor Carlos Moreno, which he sees as “overhyped” and “a bit vapid.” The Opening Ceremony will feature with a 6-kilometer-long parade down the cleaned-up river Seine. Dominique Perrault’s 51-hectare athletes’ village in Saint-Denis, which serves to further showcase many of the methods and 2050 benchmarks championed by Hidalgo, will be turned over to the city for its stewardship and eventually reuse beginning March 1st.

‘A spectacle of reform’: Rowan Moore throws cold water on NEOM's motivation and sustainable claims

2023-12-05T11:49:00-05:00

Conceivably, as one architect speculates, The Line will be “a Noah’s Ark for the happy few”, a privileged AI-controlled citadel set in an inhospitable desert. Otherwise it will be clickbait visible from space, two vast and pointless lines of glass whose colossal construction cost would defeat the Vision 2030 plan to reduce dependency on oil revenues. What’s more likely is that it will never be completed.

The Observer architecture critic blasts The Line as nonsensical, poorly conceived, a youthful self-promotional tool of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and ultimately mocking the leader’s claims that it is “designed to protect and enhance nature” before predicting much of it will never be completed.

NEOM has recently unveiled a trio of resort concepts for the Gulf of Aqaba, bringing the total number of planned developments to seven. As Moore points out, many of the projects’ realization dates remain unpublicized — hazy as though a desert mirage.

Thomas Heatherwick wants architects to improve mental health through 'interestingness'

2023-10-23T19:02:00-04:00

Boring, soulless buildings are making people stressed and lonely, according to Thomas Heatherwick [...] Calling for “a national conversation” about halting the spread of depressing architecture, he said: “We need to fearlessly demand interestingness. We need to rebel against the blandification of our streets, towns and cities, and make buildings that nourish our senses. Human beings deserve human places.”

The Lantern House and Vessel designer has been making the media rounds lately to promote his new treatise Humanize, which offers a call-to-arms of sorts for architects and planners both looking to combat the proven detriments bad architecture has on mental health. Heatherwick says his prognosis has been informed by multiple years of domestic research, including a new study he commissioned from the New Economics Foundation, and that offenders could be broken down by seven criteria: (too) flat, straight, plain, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, and serious.

Responding to this, the Observer critic Rowan Moore writes Heatherwick “does not have much to say about the value of simplicity” and that his argument is too reductivist and could result in “an outbreak of shallow wannabe Gaudís” should architects adapt his principles en masse. His position that Heathwick was too ignorant of the market forces behind modern architecture, however, seems to misunderstand the point of making such an appea...

‘Varying degrees of skill, splendour and social worth’: Rowan Moore picks his favorites for the 2023 Stirling Prize

2023-05-31T19:13:00-04:00

The Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore recently gave a cursory look at the 131 winning projects selected for RIBA Regional Awards to pick a quintet of designs he feels offer the best chances at receiving this year’s Stirling Prize, which will be announced later in the fall.

Given the criticism of the Prize last year, these should be more cognizant of design trends that prefer reuse and the application of other sustainable methods and materials.

Moore takes the opposite approach, favoring above all the concern for quality and style some felt was excluded last year before predicting boldly the selection will come down to either Grafton's new Marshall Building at the LSE in London or the MMAS-designed St James’ Farm at Bog Meadows in Belfast.

"They may also be deterred by the current mistrust of concrete. It would be shame, if so, for this is architecture with a pulse," he states of the former.

Moore's full preview can be found here. Photos of the five selected frontrunners ...

Rowan Moore wants a ‘truce’ between King Charles' traditionalists and the avant-garde

2023-05-09T12:08:00-04:00

The incurable optimist in me still wonders: could his yearnings about the built environment be more beneficially directed? Charles may have been at war with much of the architectural world for nearly 40 years, but might they not unite over what they have in common? They all want sustainable communities and good design. Architects and the monarch also have a shared enemy: the sacrifice of positive architectural qualities to housebuilders’ pursuit of profit.

Moore’s calls echo in some regard the statements made by housing secretary Michael Gove last year, in which he called for an openness to classicism given there is “no silver bullet to solve the housing crisis” domestically. Stirling Prize winners Mikhail Riches and Alison Brooks Architects are brought in as examples of those left out in the fray he created by virtue of his comments and status as an “unofficial addition” to the country's planning system.

“If he were to do anything more in the realm of architecture,” Moore writes, “it should be generous: He could praise those architects who, even if their style is not to his personal taste, dedicate energy and skill to making British towns and cities better places to live.”

Elsewhere, the Architects’ Journal reported that Norman Foster would also like a word with his new king.

A ‘ham-fisted ego trip’: Rowan Moore delves into Modi's divisive Central Vista project

2023-04-06T11:02:00-04:00

It is the centrepiece of the Central Vista Project, an ambitious plan to make over the city’s British-built administrative centre. Critics of the new building say that it is an unnecessary replacement of the existing parliament, that short cuts were taken with its procurement and the obtaining of permissions, and that there was minimal consultation with parliamentarians and the public.

The Prime Minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party has maintained the US$150M project is a “necessity” and expects its inauguration to take place soon after previously redying for a debut by the end of October.

Modi appeared encouraged on a “surprise” hour-long site visit last Thursday. The more modernized four-story facility will offer 40 square meters of office space to each of India’s 545 parliament members in addition to holding a lounge, dining areas, library, 5,000-piece art collection, and constitution hall meant to honor its now 75 years of independence.

Lesley Lokko tells Rowan Moore architecture's story is still 'incomplete'

2023-03-29T11:00:00-04:00

It’s a fact that Africa stands for something that comes from outside. But Africans share something that is 100% there. There is a sense, particularly among the young, that the time has come to define that something on their own terms. There is a sense that it is our time.

The woman tasked with leading the 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice this summer told The Guardian critic about the ideas involved in producing the Biennale, which promises a packed slate highlighting the untapped potential Africa contains.

She also spoke to Africa’s status as a continent lacking in homegrown architects and defined by “instability and invention, minimally constrained by professional structures, where the 'speed of change is likely to outstrip the ability to understand it.'”

Polymathic Nigerian designer Demas Nwoko was recently named as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement recipient of this year's edition. The 2023 Venice Biennale opens May 20th with a special awards ceremony held at the exhibition’s Ca' Giustinian headquarters in San Marco.

Rowan Moore picks his favorite UK projects for 2022

2022-12-30T15:22:00-05:00

Playful, elegant additions to universities and colleges were the class acts to follow, while the newly opened Elizabeth line exceeded all design expectations.

Grimshaw’s long-awaited Elizabeth Line finished second (behind Grafton’s Marshall Building for the LSE). Moore said: “The Elizabeth line, when it finally opened in May, revealed an alternative universe of underground railway travel where everything is bigger, brighter and swisher. This is due to the sheer scale of the stations and to their design – unified and orderly but also curvaceous and a touch baroque.”

Notably absent were any projects by the new Soane Medal winner Peter Barber, any other social housing projects, or the Stirling Prize-winning The New Library, Magdalene College from Niall McLaughlin. The Guardian critic did say he admired Theaster Gates’ community building-inspired Serpentine Pavilion, adding that the all-black design “nicely captured shadow and light and views of surrounding greenery.”

Moshe Safdie says he 'paid a price' for antagonizing post-modernism

2022-10-31T12:22:00-04:00

“In the 70s and 80s, my ideas were ignored. I was antagonistic to postmodernism [...] and I paid a price.”

The 84-year-old Habitat 67 mastermind sat down with Rowan Moore to discuss his career and new memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture. Among other topics, he said he had “no idea” that his 2011 Marina Bay Sands design would become “an instant icon” and that the political situation in his native Israel brings him “great frustration” even though he believes supporters of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) movement are making a “stupid mistake.”

Safdie then spoke to the chilling reception that met his post-Habitat endeavors in Puerto Rico and New York, which failed to “replicate like mushrooms” as the then 30-something architect had expected. An exhibition of Safdie’s unrealized work is conveniently on display at the Boston Architectural College’s McCormick Gallery from now through January 2nd.

Relate on Archinect: ‘More Than 50 Percent Of My Work Is Unbuilt’ says Moshe Safdie in new Time-Space-Existence video

“As an architect committed to building and impacting the e...

'Here, the architecture wins': Rowan Moore on the inside-out quality of the newly-completed Battersea Power Station

2022-10-11T09:00:00-04:00

The project as whole also creates a highly managed territory of the sort that you tend to get in single-owner developments which, despite some funky moves by a Frank Gehry-designed apartment block, is fundamentally predictable. It threatens to cage the beast that is Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece, as might the array of retail logos inside. But, between the blandscape outside and the brandscape within, the power station is cussed enough to assert its own character.

The £9 billion final boss of Greater London adaptive reuse projects (along with the Barbican) is a story of inside and out for Moore, who sees the program’s housing element as an “awkward” mismatch when compared to WilkinsonEyre’s tastefully “sober” and restrained interior retail spaces that come dotted with “outbreaks of cautious fantasy.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by WilkinsonEyre (@wilkinsoneyre)

The Observer critic also opined that it does offer a “striking contrast” to the mixed architecture of nearby Vauxhall and Nine Elms, adding its survival can be attributed to the growing influence of heritage considerations in British planning schemes. “If only some of the thoughtfulness applied to old buildings could be applied to the planning of new ones,” he lamented, “we might be getting somewhere.”

Rowan Moore issues a blow to the Selldorf-led Sainsbury Wing redevelopment

2022-06-23T09:00:00-04:00

The problem is that the proposed new work is something else altogether to Venturi and Scott Brown’s playfulness and personality. It has curving glass balustrades, white walls and oak-clad pillars, and expanses of plain paving outside. It is an architecture of near-emptiness, the default style of international art-world good taste.

Moore ran through the litany of changes Annabelle Selldorf is making in replacement of the current iteration’s “bum notes,” which the critic pinned on a rift between the original expansion's benefactors and what was then called Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

This is now the second Denise Scott Brown-designed museum that Selldorf has laid her (very capable) hands-on after the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego revamp, which she said engendered a “greater clarity across the history of all the building types.” Moore, seizing on the difference in intrusion levels between the two similar projects, said “there could be more rapport between the current and the proposed and more cleverness and wit” before making a surprising turn to his own long-distant past.

Moore concluded, “by refusing to align themselves with any one architectural camp, trad...

An 'abuse of metaphors': Rowan Moore on Thomas Heatherwick’s tree-inspired jubilee design (and other UK public monument debates)

2022-05-02T16:03:00-04:00

I’ll pass by the abuse of metaphors (do milestones have hearts?) but not of trees, this being another case of certain designers’ mania for picking them up, moving them around and putting them where they don’t want to be. Those words from the studio also take liberties with the idea of art. They call the Tree of Trees a “sculpture”. Boris Johnson may once have compared Heatherwick to Michelangelo, but David it is not.

The Observer critic joined a plethora of online commentators that picked apart Heatherwick Studio’s “Tree Of Trees” Earth Day announcement by comparing it to last year’s fiasco surrounding the MVRDV-designed Marble Arch Mound, which he described as a “cartoon version of nature is placed in a London ceremonial space by people who don’t seem to have thought much about what it is that makes trees lovely.”

Moore has been critical of Heatherwick’s design inspiration in the past, referring to The Vessel designer as a “pied piper [of the] very rich” in a 2017 missive and famously citing his work as an example of the migration away from “grown-up architecture” in a 2019 piece, in which he derided cloying gimmicks that offer “at most two-liners.”

Moore also touched on the controversial (and recently-rejected) UK Holocaust Memorial proposal, laying its failure on the decision to include a learning center and stating that the government should now “take the opportunity of its verdict to apply...

Guardian critic Rowan Moore on London’s coming underground colossus

2022-03-14T21:46:00-04:00

This megalopolis of engineering currently lies there, pristine, unspotted by gum or pigeon, with its 319-tonne trains gliding quietly through every few minutes, empty, so that those operating the system can familiarise themselves with the choreography of all that heavy metal. Electronic indicator boards announce their coming with white digits, a notch classier than the orange ones on the old tube.

Moore described the nearly empty £18.33 billion ($23.84 billion) project as an “alternative universe” before likening the transition between the new Elizabeth line and older Central Underground to a scene from (attempted architecture critic) Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

The full line is expected to be complete by 2023. Hopes were for the originally planned construction to end in 2018, before being pushed back three separate times owing to the pandemic and a variety of other causes. The expansion will eventually feature a motley slate of new stations from Hawkins\Brown and other big-name firms, but Moore doesn’t expect the enormous feat to be repeated any time soon, given the rise of certain ascendant technologies in the role of city planning.

“It can take a generation, in other words, to make something such as this happen. Since we are in a climate emergency, whatever environmental benefits may come from further such splurges on public transport – which incur upfront carbon ...

Rowan Moore on the year that was in architecture

2021-12-30T13:00:00-05:00

What can be said of a world where one billionaire wants to build a giant tulip-shaped tower of little practical use and another wants to house thousands of students in windowless rooms in a block with all the charm of an Amazon distribution centre?

The Observer critic further continued his contrasting of Foster + Partner’s failed Tulip Tower with the Munger Hall development in California, claiming that each was the vanity project of a wayward billionaire.

“Both projects seem driven by ego, but in the wide space between the brutal functionalism of the latter and the redundant gesturing of the former, you might hope to find places where beauty is put in the service of the usual and unusual needs of human life.”

Moore also commended the push for more adaptive reuse projects in cities while recognizing the rise of mass timber as a step in the right direction. He didn’t share the same opinion, however, about biophilic design enhancements, which are increasingly perfunctory marketing gimmicks.

“The idea was to say something or other about the importance of having nature in cities, but any suspicion that these projects were, like the Tulip, a teeny bit gestural was resoundingly confirmed by the contrast between the lush landscape t...

Architects need 'better ways to engage the public': Rowan Moore on Trump's classical architecture order

2020-12-28T14:41:00-05:00

In fact, America has beautiful and popular non-traditional structures – the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles – and it has crude and soulless classical buildings. Unfortunately, the authors of the order are not completely wrong when they say that some architects have ignored public feeling.

Rowan Moore, architecture critic at The Observer, responds to last week's presidential executive order that makes classical and traditional architecture the preferred style for federal buildings.

"If architects don’t want to give ammunition to the repressive thinking behind this order," Moore writes, "they have to show that there are better ways to engage the public."

The challenges of using office conversions as housing remedy

2020-09-28T16:22:00-04:00

Shield House is just one example of “permitted development”. It is an outcome of a government experiment in deregulation, which allows homes to be made out of old offices and shops without planning permission, that has been going on for some years. An estimated 65,000 flats have been made in this way.

The Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore highlights in his latest Guardian piece the failed outcome of a government program that seeks to speed up the conversion of old commercial properties into residential spaces.

"The experiment has been catastrophic in several significant respects, but the government has recently decided to double down on it, expanding their policy such that office blocks may now be replaced with entirely new buildings without permission," Moore writes. "This means that undersized and badly planned and located flats can now be realised at a larger scale," adding, "this is the famous definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – applied, with devastating effects, to the places where people live."

Frank Gehry reflects on Eisenhower Memorial design controversies

2020-09-09T15:08:00-04:00

“I came away blindsided [by Eisenhower's legacy]. It brings tears to my eyes. How his accomplishments as a general and as a president match anything, all without the fanfare that’s going on around the president now. The opposite. He was modest but strong. A staggering accomplishment.”

Rowan Moore, architecture critic at The Observer, interviews architect Frank Gehry for The Guardian regarding the soon-to-open Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. The contentious memorial, which drew the ire of conservative architecture critics, was developed by Gehry Partners in collaboration with AECOM, and is set to debut to the public September 17th.

In the interview, Gehry expresses frustration over criticisms lobbed at the design's contemporary approach, arguing that these critics focused on “arbitrary bullshit" by expecting that the memorial "should be classical architecture, period, and there’s no room for any invention or new expression as the world continues to change."

The case against skyscrapers

2020-07-15T13:46:00-04:00

[...] tall buildings are still sold on the basis that they are good for the environment. Mostly the argument is about density – if you pile a lot of homes or workplaces high on one spot, it is said, then you can use land and public transport more efficiently. There’s some truth in this, but you can also achieve high levels of density without going above 10 or 12 storeys.

The Observer's Rowan Moore dissects a list of the usual arguments in favor of ever taller buildings around the world and concludes that not much of it passes the reality test of urgent climate crisis, resource scarcity, wealth distribution, city planning, global pandemic, and ultimately, good design.

Rowan writes: "It has been deemed acceptable – by the building regulations, by architects, by the professional media – to rip untold tonnes of matter from the earth and to pump similar tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in order to produce magical architectural devices that might, if all their wizardry were to function as promised, pay back some of their carbon debt some time in the next century. By when it might be too late."

Airports as destinations in themselves

2019-12-30T19:10:00-05:00

The new breed of airports take that altered reality and alter it some more, to create their own version of the world. If you want to be dystopian, airports are prototypes for sinister societies of the future, products of the military-entertainment complex where dictatorial government colludes with big business to create controlling environments. Where individuals are pacified by distractions and ruled by technology.

The Observer's Rowan Moore takes a critical look at the newest global breed of airport architecture, including the recently opened Beijing Daxing and the brand new Singapore Jewel Changi, in the face of climate change, commerce, and mass surveillance.

"It is sometimes pointed out that a modern airport occupies the ground area of a traditional city and has a comparable daytime population," Moore writes. "With its shops and parks, and its settings for romance and afternoons out, Changi is taking on more of the functions of a city, too."

London's Millennium Dome is turning 20

2019-12-06T15:15:00-05:00

It was supposed to be the ultimate symbol of Cool Britannia. Instead it became a nightmare that exposed the spin and hubris of the New Labour project [...]

The Observer's architecture critic, Rowan Moore, revisits the events leading up to the opening night debacle of the Richard Rogers-designed and much hyped, but ultimately failed, London Millennium Dome on January 1st, 2000.

"The Millennium Experience that it contained then is dimly remembered, like a TV soap opera that didn’t catch on," Moore writes. "It was eclipsed, as Blairite catastrophes go, by the invasion of Iraq three years later."

Aerial view of the Dome in 2005. Photo: Messer Woland/Wikimedia Commons

Rowan Moore praises Bjarke Ingels as Rem Koolhaas "without the scent of intellectual and psychological complication"

2019-10-09T14:35:00-04:00

[Amager Bakke] is a work that revels in its own contrivance, a condensation and celebration of the surrounding artifice, a creation of what might be called hypernature. It is at once an energy facility, converting refuse into electricity, and a ski slope. It is arresting and striking. It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities [...]

Writing in The Guardian, architecture critic Rowan Moore heaps praise on Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the firm's founder in a write-up of the firm's recently completed Amager Bakke project in Copenhagen.

Describing the architect's ability to impress clients, Moore writes, "He learned the power of shock from his former boss, Rem Koolhaas, without the scent of intellectual and psychological complication that major clients sometimes find off-putting about the latter. He presents himself as a seer, intoning about the future he means to shape, about the 'world-changing power of form-giving', but a cheeky one."

Rowan Moore on the added significance of Grafton Architects' RIBA Royal Gold Medal win

2019-10-07T18:36:00-04:00

It is built into the value system of architecture – the ways in which it is taught, published, recognised and awarded – that the most desirable possible outcome of a career is to be a celebrated maker of singular objects, of buildings that can be admired as you would a painting or a symphony. [...] It’s a start that the prize is to Grafton Architects – that is to say, a whole practice – rather than its two principals alone.

Rowan Moore, the Observer’s architecture correspondent, applauds in his recent commentary the decision to award the next RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to Irish practice Grafton Architects, a deserving team with female principals at the helm, rather than further perpetuating the glorified idol of the lone (overwhelmingly male) genius.

"[...] it would be no bad thing if the RIBA followed up on this year’s tap on its (doubtless beautifully designed) glass ceiling by honouring more architects who are both female and not wannabe Howard Roarks," Moore writes. "There is quite a queue of under-recognised women they could choose from."

Rowan Moore asks: Whatever happened to grown-up architecture?

2019-04-11T17:39:00-04:00

Responding to recent works by Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels, Rowan Moore interrogates architecture's obsession du jour. With each recently unveiling their "most striking landmark to date"—for Heatherwick, the Vessel and for Ingels, the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy power plant—Moore is prompted to ask: "why does great architecture have to be fun?"

In his latest for the Guardian, Moore notes the reverence for child-like pleasure that sits at the heart of the work of two of architecture's most talked about practitioners—which is hardly meant to be taken as a positive. "They offer at most two-liners," Moore says of the architectural gimmicks that have made clients such as Google flock to their work.

Despite bringing them high-profile commissions, the fun in their work—at least as skeptical critics have come to see it—are puns without a purpose; a building with kissing roofs whose only answer to the question of "why?" is "why not?"

"There’s real power and attraction in those exces...