It's a bumpy start for Mons as European Capital of Culture 2015

2015-01-13T15:00:00-05:00

Only one of the new buildings is ready, its centrepiece artwork had to be dismantled after bits fell off – and people are more excited about getting their first Ikea. [...] A €155m new station, designed by Santiago Calatrava as a swooping sci-fi bird, is so far no more than a concrete foundation slab. It replaces a much-loved 1950s station by a local architect, and it’s now optimistically scheduled to open in 2018, having escalated to four times its original budget.

Libeskind opens his latest building in Belgium today. Is it a snooze?

2015-01-09T13:50:00-05:00

In 2015, Libeskind’s brand of Deconstructivism (and all varieties of Deconstructivism, one might argue) amounts to a familiar, dull architecture; a calcified formal language whose shock-factor and novelty has worn away. One would hope that Libeskind, as a leading architectural practitioner, could at least try to articulate a new agenda in the experimental vein of his earlier work. Alas — as the Mons International Conference Xperience shows — that’s not the case.

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It's a bumpy start for Mons as European Capital of Culture 2015

Libeskind opens his latest building in Belgium today. Is it a snooze?