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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."

Marina Tabassum is the 2021 Soane Medalist

2021-11-17T14:18:00-05:00

Marina Tabassum has been named the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Soane Medal honoring her lifework and innovation in the field. The Marina Tabassum Architects founder is the fourth recipient of the medal joining Denise Scott Brown, Rafael Moneo, and Kenneth Frampton on a list of past winners.

Widely admired for her attempts to move away from for-profit architecture and towards a more just and humane application of the profession, Tabassum has been lauded as a trailblazer for female architects, as well as women of color, and was recently among several architects and urban planners named as Academy of American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award winners.

Tabassum referred to past medal winners in a lecture delivered at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London on Tuesday.

“I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on,” she began.

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Architectural historian to manage Queen of England's vast art collection

2017-12-22T13:56:00-05:00

The Queen has appointed Tim Knox, 55, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to be the new director of the Royal Collection Trust. He has been the museum’s director since 2013 and is an architectural historian and country house curator. [...] His early career was spent at the Royal Institution of British Architects. He then served as the head curator of the National Trust (2002-05), from which he went on to be the director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum (2005-13).

"The Royal Collection is one of the world’s greatest, comprising more than a million objects from all aspects of fine and decorative art," The Art Newspaper writes. "It is not the personal property of The Queen, but is held in trust by Her Majesty for her successors and the nation."

MIT launches three-year collaboration with London’s Soane Museum

2015-10-27T17:57:00-04:00

The collaboration will consist of seminars, workshops, and studio classes for MIT students and potential exhibitions at MIT and the Soane Museum. This fall, the Department of Architecture is offering the program’s first class, a reconsideration of architectural fragments [...] “The Fragment,” taught by David Gissen, a visiting professor in the History, Theory and Criticism program, will explore architectural monuments rendered into a fragmented, disassembled, or ruined state.

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