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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
The Abu Dhabi-owned developer won planning approval for the 268-home mixed-use redevelopment of the Metropolitan Police’s HQ site in April 2016....Since then developer BL Developments has sought to increase the total number of homes by 27, from 268 to 295, with no increase in the number of affordable units or payment in lieu, meaning the level of affordable housing fell further still to only 3%. — Construction Enquirer
BL Developments, who bought the site back in 2014 for £370m, had submitted an initial proposal to transform the former Metropolitan Police headquarters into a mixed-use scheme. The plans, which involved tearing down three existing buildings to clear the way for six residential-led buildings... View full entry
This post is brought to you by 100% Design. As part of this year’s London Design Festival, 100% Design, the largest design trade show in the UK, has teamed up with Picfair, a revolutionary new image library, and Icon, one of the world’s leading architecture and design magazines, to launch a... View full entry
This post is brought to you by designjunction. Join us over two days this September for the most important conversations about cutting-edge design. Fourteen sessions will delve into a variety of engaging topics that affect and inform the design industry. Anchored around the show’s... View full entry
Overlooking Silicon Roundabout in London's tech city is the newest and most progressive project of AHMM. Over the past 20 years, they have worked with developer giant, Derwent, in researching the ideal office environment, and White Collar Factory is the result of 8 years of this partnership. Not... View full entry
A former beer factory in the Royal Docks is set to become London’s newest creative workspace hub, which will open later this year. The Silver Building, from SODA and Nick Hartwright, will be one of the first elements of the Royal Docks’ regeneration, which will continue throughout the next... View full entry
A property firm run by a business partner of US President Donald Trump has awarded a £250 million ($320 million) contract to developers for the construction of a "Versace-branded" skyscraper in London.
Nine Elms Property awarded the contract to developers Multiplex for the construction of AYKON London One, a fifty-story tower to be built in central London at Nine Elms on the South Bank.
— Business Insider
"The world's first Versace-branded tower", AYKON London One, valued at £590 million, will consist of fifty floors and 450 apartments from one to three bedrooms, interiors of which will be designed in partnership with luxury fashion house Versace and feature panoramic-view "winter gardens". In... View full entry
Museum creation has increasingly become a major cultural export for countries. The controversial Louvre Abu Dhabi is slated to open later this year and the Guggenheim has made attempts in recent years to open up satellite museums in both Helsinki and Abu Dhabi, to name a few. Now, the... View full entry
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has announced that the city will be investing £25 million into constructing over 1,000 affordable prefab apartments. Funding from the city will go into purchasing small brownfield sites that will then be built on by Pocket Living, a developer specializing in... View full entry
As workers prepare to remove the charred debris from Grenfell Tower, the specially erected scaffolding and netting around the building that will block the view of their work from the public may be used as a kind of projection screen for local children's painting and art. At least, that's what site... View full entry
Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architecture firm behind the ambitious Tate Modern extension, took a reduced fee for work on the building project after costs went £45m over budget.
According to documents obtained by the Architect’s Journal under the Freedom of Information act, Herzog & de Meuron was asked not to take its full fee for extra work on the 10-storey building, which went from costing £215m in 2012 to £260m in 2015.
— theartnewspaper.com
The Art Newspaper cites the minutes from a 2015 Tate board of trustees meeting: "Conversation at a senior level indicates that [Herzog & de Meuron] will look sympathetically on this position, but that costs have already been incurred to a certain level, which will require some recompense... View full entry
The Antepavilion program, a joint venture between the Architecture Foundation and the Arthouse Foundation, launched an international competition to design a £25,000 pop-up rooftop at Columbia and Brunswick Wharf in Hackney, north-east London. The goal was to invite architects, artists and... View full entry
Lord Davies, the chair of the trust, wrote to Khan outlining the reasons why the trust had taken the decision. He said it was “with great regret that trustees have concluded that without mayoral support, the project cannot be delivered”. — The Guardian
Back in April, London mayor Sadiq Khan announced that he would not spend any more taxpayer money on the controversial garden bridge plan. The project, propelled by Khan's predecessor, Boris Johnson, has been criticized for its inability to raise the private funds promised and its subsequent... View full entry
The point is, skaters made that area safe; in the old days it was cardboard city. That is what skating does: it fills the cracks in society left by capitalist development … that is where skating exists. It’s like a fungus, it’s like moss, it just grows in the corners where no one else wants to be. — The Guardian
Back in 2004, two-thirds of a popular skateboarding site at the Southbank Centre in London was destroyed. In 2014, the final third of the site was on its way to closure when the property management changed hands. Seeing the turnover as an opportunity, a campaign—Long Live Southbank—began that... View full entry
Each of the settings on display in the exhibit capture that promise of the future balanced with the starkness of reality. The settings also celebrate a disappearing craft—hand-drawn animation. The anime industry long resisted the shift to computer-generated art that took hold in the West starting in the 1990s, but as technology has advanced, fewer and fewer artists practice the craft traditionally, making the art on display especially striking. — The Smithsonian
London's House of Illustration is currently displaying “Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan”, an exhibition that showcases over 100 of the intricate paintings and drawings used in the production of iconic dystopian anime films like “Ghost in the Shell” and “Akira”. View full entry