Some suggest that Alison and Peter Smithson were the first examples of starchitecture, as Norman Blogster calls the “more PR than architecture” careers of stylists like Hadid and Liebeskind. But when our reader Kristian Seier challenged us to find something bad to say about the Upper Lawn Pavilion (later known as the Solar Pavilion), their […]
Maya Lin is an architect with an extraordinary ability to find the symbolic form that will reconcile all the conflicting elements of a public design brief. Most famously she did this in the Washington Vietnam memorial,
(Photo genenphotos)
that deep black scar in the earth that paralled the scar the war left in the American soul, […]
February 13, 2008 – 12:27 am
Respect for layering is a basic heritage principle.
Heritage places are the result of a layering of history, of use and change, and it is the values related to this layering which is important.
(Pearson & Marshall, 1995, Study of World Heritage Values Convict Places)
The principle is so fundamental that it is now a given that contemporary […]
December 11, 2007 – 4:18 pm
We’ve received some interesting suggestions from readers recently (send more, more, more)
and one of the most interesting was this house of adaptively reused windows in the alternative community Christiania in Copenhagen, sent by Kristian Seier who says
the glass house and its many neighbours are seriously under threat these years, but the wild, everyday poetry of […]
November 2, 2007 – 2:02 pm
(Photo fitaloon)
You’ve made your gazillions and now you need somewhere to get away from it all, a place that’s safe and secure, secluded but not too far from civilisation? You like messing around in boats? Of course you own your own helicopter? Then have we got the place for a swashbuckler like you!
As The Independent […]
November 2, 2007 – 11:59 am
A quick addendum to our last post. You can be sure that archaeological sites all over Iraq are in danger. The Art Newspaper has just reported this, a police barracks being built on a site next to Samarra’s famous spiral minaret.
Alastair Northedge, Professeur d’Art et d’Archeologie Islamiques, Universite de Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) comments
From the […]
October 28, 2007 – 5:50 pm
You can always rely on the military to make a right mess of a place. Sometimes it’s incidental, sometimes it’s intentional and often its downright consciously genocidal. The US military in Iraq have probably been responsible for all three categories of mayhem.
Unfortunately, their appalling adaptive reuse of the archaeological site of Babylon
(Photo labanex)
as a […]
February 14, 2007 – 1:08 am
(Photo by busymonster)
This blog developed from our search for adaptively reused quarries and when we relaunched it back in April last year our first post was about the adaptive reuse of a cement works near Vancouver, now the Butchart Gardens, one of the most visited tourist attractions in Canada. We were trying to prove that […]
January 17, 2007 – 9:33 pm
The history of prefab buildings is long and honorable (even the First Fleet sent out to set up a British colony in Australia in 1788 brought prefab buildings), and the importance of old prefab buildings cannot be understated for they are among the most vulnerable elements of the built environment. It is especially true of […]
January 13, 2007 – 2:46 pm
(Photo Colin Gregory Palmer)
It’s one of the most recognisable buildings in the world, certainly the most famous power station. You would think its adaptive reuse would be so obvious and simple, yet the devious twists and turns in its recent history, the trickery and betrayals, would make baby Jesus weep. Yes, it’s Battersea Power Station, […]
