“Every child,” lamented Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House of 1981, “goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse”. Had there ever been another place on earth, he also said of Bauhaus-influenced America, “where so many people of wealth and power paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested?” — The Guardian

The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has built ‘a gliding swan’ of a house in Devon that strikes a perfect balance between inside and out, whichever way you look — The Guardian

Portman was a pioneer of the devices with which somber modernism was given glitz: mirror-glass, wall-climbing glass lifts, sky bridges, swooping curves. He described some gaudy candelabra he put around a piano stage in the Atlanta Marriott Marquis as a “homage to Liberace”. His buildings became known for their “Jesus moments”, those times when, emerging from a deliberately understated entry into some architectural emulation of the Grand Canyon, a visitor would reliably exclaim, “Jesus!” — The Guardian

Escobedo’s approach is, she says, not about the look of the architectural object, but “how you feel inside the space, how you go about it in the moment”. It is designed for the “very specific space and time” of the Serpentine’s lawn in summer, but is also for the future in which, like previous pavilions, it will be sold to private collectors. Since “we don’t know where it’s going”, the design “can absorb locality no matter where it is”. — The Guardian

Farrell and McNamara’s theme is “Freespace”, which they say describes “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda”. It can also mean the “free and additional spatial gifts” that architecture can offer and “its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”. They have invited a selection of like-minded architects to demonstrate these qualities with three-dimensional installations of “scale and quality”. — The Guardian

The dominant theme is that of the expression of identity, the overwhelming preference in British mosque design being for traditional elements and decoration – especially dome, minaret and arches – applied to sometimes basic box-like structures. From time to time the cry goes up, including in Jonathan Glancey’s introduction to this book, that a “contemporary” Islamic British style should be developed. — The Guardian

London’s new US embassy may be just a glass cube with disguised fortifications, but it is also restrained, efficient, green… the antithesis of Donald Trump [...]

It’s a fortress, of course it is. As the embassy of the Great Satan to the Little Satan – as the unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini would have put it – it couldn’t not be a target and defended accordingly. The architects therefore decided to make it as nice a fortress as possible [...]. — The Guardian

As Herzog explains, piling some refined Swiss biscuits on the table in front of him to illustrate his point, an earlier design envisaged stacked-up glass cubes, but the material was too similar to the developers’ stuff. “We realised that in order to survive we have to strengthen it,” he says [..]

Yet the precedent of the original Tate Modern – also severe on the outside, lively inside – shows that a building doesn’t have to gurn and wheedle to be popular. — The Guardian

The suspicion is that the Pritzker judges haven’t changed all that much, and are backing an iconic-humanitarian architect, a flipside to the starchitects they previously promoted rather than a radical alternative [...]

Some scepticism is in order, as to whether the Pritzker committee have suddenly become experts in the vastly complicated business of humanitarian architecture and whether there might be a large dose of gesture and symbolism in their actions. — theguardian.com

Regulations have progressively made homes more sustainable and energy-efficient, and voluntary codes take these standards further. Architects like to push them further still [...]

There are now housing associations and developers who can see the point of good design, and others who can’t quite, but still feel as if they should employ it. The public, too, perhaps encouraged by the TV programmes of Kevin McCloud, are more open to contemporary architecture. — theguardian.com