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Absent friends: “Modern British Sculpture” at the Royal Academy, London.
The whole of modern British sculpture in one show? Even by the standards of Royal Academy blockbusters, that is an ambitious task. Especially as this keenly-anticipated exhibition is not a snapshot of...
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Skintight architecture: the London 2012 Olympic Velodrome
Back in July 2005, when London won the 2012 Olympics, I was more than a little sceptical. Much better for our nearest rival Paris to have got it, I reasoned, big public projects like this in Britain...
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The saintly and the sybaritic: restoring London’s astonishing St. Pancras hotel.
Some buildings are more than mere buildings. They are symbols of something else. Consider the Sydney Opera House. Not great for opera, I’m told, but who cares? It is a confident statement of cultural...
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The straight and the skewed: Chipperfield’s two new English art museums.
This is a rare opportunity to compare and contrast two new buildings of the same typology in the same country (north and south), by the same architect, completed virtually simultaneously. I reviewed...
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Zaha on Clyde: and the new wave of British regional museums.
Any new building by Zaha Hadid, the best-known and most successful female architect in history, is an event. I even went to Cincinnati once to see her first big art gallery and believe me, Cincinnati...
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“After this it will be all Danish butter-factories”: Philip Larkin and the...
Philip Larkin, who with his small output of determinedly unshowy, unmodernist and intensely evocative verse became the pre-eminent poet of post-war England, was the University librarian in Hull. He...
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High tea at Rothschild’s: OMA and the dynastic bank.
I was late, very late, but that was good. The press tour round OMA’s new headquarters for merchant bank N.M. Rothschild in the financial heart of the City of London had concluded on the top floor of...
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