Author: jaywp

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…

New Prado Architect Rafael Moneo in Spain is not one to run for the architects’ Graffiti prize, that is, the practice of erecting extraordinary, mind-boggling, gobsmacking monuments to one self across the major cities of the world. The new extension…

The famous super-architects Herzog and de Meuron have evolved a different aesthetic for their newly-accepted proposals for the gallery extension. Signature architecture is not really in it, since the building design appears to have nothing to link it stylistically to…

This exhibition, which runs to 10 June 2007 is already attracting interest from across Europe. It matches an exhibition now being mounted in China, entitled ‘Aftershock: Contemporary British Art l990-2006’. They have Tracey Emin’s bed and soiled accessories, as well…

A major crisis is looming in Britain, in the field of government support for the arts. The present Minister for the Arts, Culture, and Sport, Ms Tessa Jowell, seems powerless and incapable of forestalling what will be a growing shortfall…

One thing that Charles Saumurez Smith won’t miss, as he transfers to the Secretaryship of the Royal Academy, is the duplicity of ministers over picture purchase funds. He will relish the highly professional culture of the Royal Academy, with its…