Archive

The common tendency for historians in the nineteenth century has been to marginalise those ethnic ‘nations’ such as the Picts, the Carthaginians and the Etruscans largely because there is little trace linguistically of these remarkable groups. The Etruscans are a…

This year six Building Projects by British architects have been nominated out of the many submissions. More notably, four of these are for building projects abroad. This has rightly caused a surge of criticism of the conservative attitudes that architects…

Six new works will be launched by Sir Anthony Caro this autumn, not this time at Venice where the Gondoliers once parodied his work outside Harry’s Bar (some years back it must be said). Five of these are typically large,…

Jake and Dinos Chapman have pulled it off again, in the forecourt of the Royal Academy (too large to go inside). Their mega-sculpture, dwarfing most Henry Moores even, is entitled ‘The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, but not the Mineral…

There is so much to thank Google for (here speaks an editor and a thousand contributors), but they have succumbed (perhaps temporarily) to a common US condition of denial about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Recently the…

So the great Swedish film director and theatre producer Ingmar Bergman has at last died, aged 89, on his island off the coast of Sweden. Earlier this summer he was still talking in interview of a last film, on the…

Tate Modern’s extension project has received a donation from John Studzinski of £5 million, which makes it more likely that this multi-million pound project will reach its financial targets. Studzinski is to be congratulated for his courage in embracing the…

The Royal Festival Hall, designed and opened in l951 on the Thames by Sir Leslie Martin (then of the London County Council, subsequently Sir Colin St John Wilson’s predecessor at the British Library/British Museum) is at last open again for…

The news in mid-May that Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, had won the highly prestigious Gulbenkian Prize for the extension to its existing gallery came through just as Sir Colin St John Wilson RA, its architect was dying in London, aged…

Greenwich, London, was praised recently as containing ‘a constellation of architectural treasures’. Apart from the Harrison Planetarium at the Royal Observatory (designed by Architects Allies and Morrison of Royal Festival Hall fame), there is now the Temporary Visitors Centre for…

The tremors are still just threatening, but Antonio Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona (work commenced in 1882) is currently on red alert on account of a plan to force a tunnel for high-speed trains close by its own…

The proactive three of the seven United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and minuscule Sharjah, have formed a triplemover with a surge in the Gulf of high profile museum building for the Arts. The Gulf Art Fair held early in…