Free to ignore building standards for dwellings, student housing isn’t just ruining British cities – it’s damaging student life. As universities start back, we reveal how developers get away with it [...]
Hardly a year goes by without a slab of PBSA featuring on the Carbuncle Cup shortlist for the ugliest UK building. This year it was the turn of a dismal block in Portsmouth, designed by Cooley Architects for Unite, the biggest student housing provider in the country.
— The Guardian
Besides aesthetics, Wainwright also points out issues of affordability, government regulation, and basic building safety: the Portsmouth housing block, as well as other new Unite student accommodations, failed fire safety tests of their cladding systems in July, conducted after the tragic Grenfell... View full entry
Good walls make good neighbours – but not, it seems, when they are made entirely of glass. Five residents of the multi-million-pound Neo Bankside towers, which loom behind Tate Modern like a crystalline bar chart of inflated land values, have filed a legal claim against the museum to have part of its viewing platform shut down. They claim that its 10th-floor public terrace has put their homes into a state of “near constant surveillance”. — The Guardian
In an apparent case of art interfering with life, the owners of the apartments next to the Tate Modern's viewing platform are trying to legally erect some kind of visual barrier between them and the visitors of the museum (although the exotic technology of curtains has apparently not yet made it... View full entry
It is true that the developers of Europe’s largest regeneration project don’t appear to do ordinary. But they don’t seem to do many black people either...Speak to any property-marketing agency and they will tell you their east-Asian clients are buying a piece of England, which – for them – means blond-haired, blue-eyed Burberry models. — The Guardian
In a particularly taut and enjoyable piece for the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright investigates the questionable marketing tactics behind a starchitect-studded project in England that is catering mainly to East Asian buyers, among several other structures being sold primarily to off-shore clients. Are... View full entry
he collapsed sailing ramp has been hauled out of the water, a Russian diplomat has heroically killed a carjacker (or maybe not), and 450,000 condoms await action in the leaky athletes village. Beset by construction problems and delays and with preparations decreed the “worst ever” by the International Olympic Committee, how is the architecture and design of the XXXI Olympiad shaping up so far? — Oliver Wainwright | the Guardian
The Olympics are in full swing. Here's how to watch them. Interest in more Olympics architecture? Check out 10 notable projects from past Olympic Games here.This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special focus on all things related to games. Check out some related articles here. View full entry
Just in time for Friday's Rio Olympics, it's time to take a look back at former Olympic villages: specifically, what good are they post-games? In London, the 560 acres of the East End that was transformed into the grounds for the 2012 Olympics have undergone the Olly Wainwright examination in his... View full entry
“He was so much more than an engineer,” says the V&A’s Zofia Trafas White, who co-curated the show with Maria Nicanor. We are walking through a corridor of the Dane’s dreamy doodles, which forms a slightly surreal start to the show [...]
“Designing,” Arup said, “is defining a sensible way of building.” Noticeably, all the projects on show trumpet their engineering credentials at full volume, as the (seemingly) logical expression of how they were made.
— Oliver Wainwright | the Guardian
For more on Ove Arup and his firm, check out these links:Ove Arup celebrated with new show at the V&AOur cities must adapt to climate change and growing populations within a single generation, according to the head of ArupArup Germany/SolarLeaf, Studio Tamassociati, and Elemental win in... View full entry
A teetering stack of fibreglass blocks has landed in Kensington Gardens, rising above the Serpentine Gallery in a stepped wall, before billowing out to form a cave-like space within...
From one side, it looks like a wall that has enjoyed a good lunch. The blocks stretch outwards in a swollen bulge, like a snake devouring its gallery-going prey. From the other, it looks caught in a stiff breeze, a pixelated curtain rippling in the wind.
— the Guardian
"In keeping with the best-observed-from-a-distance nature of other BIG buildings, the detailing is also a bit clunky, with each fibreglass frame bolted and bracketed in rather heavy-handedly, due to time constraints," writes Oliver Wainwright. "Still, the interior remains a stunning space, a... View full entry
Unveiled this week, the €1bn redevelopment is the largest infrastructure project that Paris has undertaken in decades, aiming to fix the messy tangle where Europe’s biggest underground station disgorges 750,000 passengers a day into a labyrinthine warren of shops [...]
It is hugely overwrought, the layered steel roof pulled to and fro in tortured twists and turns, forming a contorted rollercoaster of curved trusses and angled bracing...
— the Guardian
"The whole thing has a forlorn droop when seen from the west, as if sagging under the weight of expectation. Nor does the colour help. Ranging between sand and rancid butter depending on the light, the yellow steelwork casts a jaundiced pallor across the scene, lending the interiors a decidedly... View full entry
Located in the middle of the Eurasian landmass 3,000km east of Moscow, with a climate that ranges from 30C mosquito-ridden summers to -40C snow-drenched winters, this isn’t the most obvious place for a tech startup hub...
The Academpark is not some random outpost in the middle of nowhere, but the latest part of a plan to revive Akademgorodok, the Soviet science town that was established here in 1957, and long since left to languish.
— the Guardian
'Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,'...Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue...These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country. — The Guardian
More on Archinect:This Wes Anderson-designed bar is retro with a capital RBuilding Wes Anderson's "Grand Budapest Hotel" out of 50,000 LegosChristopher Hawthorne reflects on the spatial design in "Citizenfour" and other Oscar nomineesArtist Charles Young crafts mini paper metropolis on the daily View full entry
When Mayor Garcetti announced Gehry’s appointment, he declared him to be the “Olmsted of our time,” referring to godfather of landscape design, Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of New York City’s Central Park. He is nothing of the sort. As Gehry himself admitted: “I told them I’m not a landscape guy.”
What he might prove to be is the funding-friendly, catch-all solution to pulling the river’s statutory partners together to make something happen.
— Olly Wainwright
"If he can suppress his expensively eye-catching cliches and channel the spirit of his early work – when he was a rough-and-ready bricoleur of everyday LA, a magician of chain-link fencing and corrugated sheeting – he might well be the man for the job. Like the rest of this chaotic... View full entry
From a super-sized cheese grater, to a contraceptive sponge, to an inadvertent fun house ride, the critics have thoroughly analogized the new Broad museum in mostly positive (if occasionally biting) reviews. To follow up with Amelia's review, published earlier today, we offer some other critical... View full entry
