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After 20 years of frantic city-building, rustic China is in a death spiral. Now architects are helping to reverse the exodus – with inspirational tofu factories, rice wine distilleries and lotus tea plants — The Guardian
Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian's architecture critic, on the new crop of Chinese architects seeking to create a renewed sense of local pride and cultural identity across the country's vast rural areas. "After an era of foreign architects using China as their playground," Wainwright quotes design... View full entry
What will homes of the future look like? According to a recent UK housing competition, Home of 2030, selected winners have an idea. However, are these ideas all that new? The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright unpacks these winning design proposals and explains, "according to the winning architects... View full entry
In the four years since the celebrated Iraqi-born architect died suddenly in March 2016, a “toxic dispute” has been taking place between the executors of her estate [...]. The long-running feud has finally been settled in an explosive court hearing involving contested allegations of financial mismanagement, disregard for corporate governance and “clandestine relationships” between the current practice principal and junior members of staff. — The Guardian
The Guardian's architecture critic Oliver Wainwright provides an update on the four-year legal feud over the sizable estate of the late Zaha Hadid — now valued at around $133 million. "The agreement will see the bulk of Hadid’s assets go to the Zaha Hadid Foundation," Wainwright... View full entry
The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright sheds light on the incredible exploitive workplace abuses happening in the UK in a recent piece titled Furlough fraud, snooping and firings: architects speak out over lockdown exploitation. From never-ending work days, to secret webcam recordings, and even bizarre... View full entry
Southwark council declared that its New Architect Design Services Framework was a “first-of-a-kind” attempt to engage with a new generation of diverse designers. As councillor Leo Pollak put it: “It is the framework some architects have been waiting for all their years.”
It turns out that black architects will have to wait even longer.
— The Guardian
Writing in The Guardian, architecture critic Oliver Wainwright highlights the long-standing barriers Black and other minority architects in the UK face with regards to attaining public building contracts. Wainwright finds that while the 2010 Equality Act compels localities to improve how... View full entry
With each of us now living in socially distanced self-isolation, with shops shuttered, offices abandoned and urban centres reduced to ghost towns, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of lasting impact Covid-19 will have on our cities. Will homes need to adapt to better accommodate work? Will pavements widen so we can keep our distance? Will we no longer want to live so densely packed together, working in open-plan offices and cramming into lifts? — The Guardian
Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright takes a long look at the ways, past and present, that architecture has been shaped by concerns over hygiene, sanitation, and disease. View full entry
“I feel like I am atoning for some of what I did,” says Yasmeen Lari with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was a ‘starchitect’ for 36 years, but then my egotistical journey had to come to an end. It’s not only the right of the elite to have good design.” — Yasmeen Lari, in The Guardian
Oliver Wainwright talks with Yasmeen Lari, who was named the 2020 Jane Drew Prize laureate earlier this year. She looks back on her architectural career, which began with designing glitzy corporate monuments and then switched to humanitarian work after the devastating 2005 Pakistan... View full entry
“Stone,” says architect Amin Taha, “is the great forgotten material of our time. In 99% of cases, it’s cheaper and greener to use stone in a structural way, as opposed to concrete or steel, but we mostly just think of using it for cladding.” — The Guardian
Oliver Wainwright's takeaways from The New Stone Age, a current exhibition at the Building Centre in London. The "great forgotten material of our time" appears to be bracing for somewhat of a comeback with architects like Amin Taha of London-based practice GROUPWORK (also one of the exhibition's... View full entry
“We have to think of buildings as material depots,” says Thomas Rau, a Dutch architect who has been working to develop a public database of materials in existing buildings and their potential for reuse. [...] “Waste is simply material without an identity,” he says. “If we track the provenance and performance of every element of a building, giving it an identity, we can eliminate waste.” — The Guardian
In an opinion piece, Oliver Wainwright writes on how more architecture firms across Europe are exploring methods on preserving, adapting, and reusing existing buildings instead of demolishing them, which hugely create CO2 emissions. But it'll take more than a few progressive architects and... View full entry
The Office of Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) much-anticipated exhibition, Countryside, The Future, is set to open next week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, according to the museum website, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild... View full entry
It was the year that council housing turned community-minded, King Arthur got a swishy new bridge and the Lake District harboured a gem — The Guardian
Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design critic at The Guardian, picked his top ten projects of the year, including a couple we have also covered on Archinect this year: the energy-efficient and 2019 Stirling Prize-winning Goldsmith Street housing project by Mikhail Riches and Cathy Hawley; and... View full entry
This all makes what is happening now all the more remarkable. Last summer, Ford Motor Company announced it had bought the building, with plans to invest $740million to transform it into a world-leading research centre for ‘future mobility’. The very industry that signed the station’s death warrant in the first place is now set on resuscitating it as a beacon of sustainable transport. — The RIBA Journal
Oliver Wainwright pens a piece on the upcoming renovation of the Michigan Central Station, which was a celebrated icon of Detroit when it first opened in 1913. After the station closed in 1988 and was abandoned, it became the epitome of the city's ruin porn. After buying the building last summer... View full entry
Ishigami’s structure is a striking object, but it could have been so much better, and it is a frustrating outcome in what has been a troubled year for the Serpentine. [...] After almost 20 years of commissioning novelty structures to host summer parties for sponsors, it feels like the format could do with a rethink and look beyond the bounds of the gallery’s garden, and the collectors’ estates where the structures end up. — Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian
A few days before the opening of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion, Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian wrote a piece calling for the Serpentine Galleries to consider rethinking the format of the yearly Serpentine Pavilion program (like appointing the architects earlier, for starters). It's been a rough... View full entry
Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds. — The Guardian
In his latest long-form piece, The Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright shows how the advent of the new 'pencil tower' building type is rapidly transforming New York City's skyline, digs in the history of zoning laws, and explains how "air rights" allow (an abundance of) cash to buy a... View full entry
[...] Peter Barber, one of the most original architects working today. Over the past decade he has built a reputation for his ingenious reinventions of traditional house types and his ability to craft characterful chunks of city out of unpromising sites.
[...] He is a master of humane high-density, designing that rare thing: new housing that feels in tune with the grain of London, in the form of neither alienating slabs nor tacky towers, without resorting to pastiche.
— The Guardian
The Guardian's architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, has nothing but praise for the award-winning firm Peter Barber Architects, a small practice that seeks to integrate social activism ideals when designing better, and more humane, housing for London. Holmes Road Studio, a whimsical housing... View full entry
