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British architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has died. The influential academic and writer who was considered to be a leading critical voice of his generation, taking aim at the banality of modernism and its encroachments on the urban sphere, lived to be 98 according to his New York Times... View full entry
Colin Fournier, the British architect and planner who helped form Archigram with Sir Peter Cook and others in the early 1960s, has passed away at age 79. He was best known for the firm’s 2003 Kunsthaus Graz and work with Bernard Tschumi on the design of Parc de la Villette in Paris. A... View full entry
One of the most notable contributors to the development of contemporary British architecture is being mourned after acclaimed Hopkins Architects co-founder Sir Michael Hopkins passed away last week at the age of 88. A pioneer of the High-Tech movement, Hopkins was considered one of the most... View full entry
Poundbury, Paisley and Perspectives all ultimately failed to conquer the complex commercial and political challenges they faced. Their royal patron’s attempts to create human-centred townscapes have led to car-dominated suburbs. His efforts to uplift grand historic buildings have carved them into dreary flats. Our King is someone who sees the right problems but, ensconced in the very establishment that prevents meaningful solutions, he can only meddle around the edges of effecting real change. — The Guardian
The new British King is memorably the originator of the panned Poundbury estate that has failed to fall in line with its stated goals towards sustainability and car-free pedestrian orientation, according to Phineas Harper. He thinks the scion is hemmed in by a stolid commercial banking system and... View full entry
Property firm GVA said it was open to offers after being asked to find a buyer for the transformed Sussex coastal landmark.
The charity behind dRMM’s much-loved refurbishment of the pier went into administration last year. Now the administrators have appointed GVA to sell the asset.
— The Architects' Journal
The charity responsible for restoring and running Hastings Pier—the once derelict landmark whose £14.2 million rebuild won this year's RIBA Stirling Prize—has been forced to put the property up for sell after experiencing some financial difficulties. According to the Architects'... View full entry
There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later. — Places Journal
The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy... View full entry
Today, London’s civic spaces are the byproduct of commercial development, the results of promises made by developers to create public amenity as a condition of planning consent. Ironically, Paris, which once imported its radical architecture from London in the form of the Pompidou Centre, now has a much more visionary approach to building, (...) it is much more of a nexus for interesting architecture. — Financial Times
London's contemporary architecture seems to have lost the radical qualities of British Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. View full entry
