Category Archives: Uncategorized
God Can Wait
Can architecture and culture revive coastal towns and make a difference as society gets older? The Towner Gallery has been transforming Eastbourne since 2009 and still has moves to make. Story by Herbert Wright The developing story of the … Continue reading
A New Twist in the DNA of Light Industrial Premises
The helix could transform perhaps the dullest of all architectural typologies – the light industrial facility. I check out the new twist it gives to a building in London called Barking Industria. London lost 1,310 hectares hectares of industrial land … Continue reading
London’s High Pavilions
Boxes of steel and glass are sucking people up into the sky. No, it’s not alien abduction. A proliferation of top-level viewing galleries are fighting to whisk the public up tall London buildings. Three new high platforms have opened in … Continue reading
The UK Housing Crisis – Do We Need a Revolution?
After World War II destroyed or damaged four million homes in the UK, a great wave of social housing construction began, reaching 300,000 new homes a year in the 1950s. But by the 1990s, local authorities weren’t building any at … Continue reading
New Solidifications of Collective Memory in the City
A concrete sandwich lies deep in a chasm between London skyscrapers. An angry Bristol crowd drag a statue through the streets. De Chirico seems to have left something at Cambridge station. The life of sculpture in public space… by Herbert … Continue reading
Elizabeth’s fantastic architectural voyage
From Malawi to Montreal, and from cosmic domes to buried passages of light, architecture proclaims her name. The woman is not an architect, but she’s had the same job for 70 years. This is the architectural voyage of the most … Continue reading
Big Digital Boxes Emerge from Hiding
The most important new architectural typology, without which our civilisation would collapse, is the data centre. In the grotto-like Zaha Hadid-designed Roca Gallery in West London, an exhibition entitled ‘Power House: The Architecture of Data Centres’ explores the subject. Its … Continue reading
Manchester’s Urbanism: from Valette to Vertical City with Visions for the Future
Manchester loves a great French Impressionist painter who is strangely obscure in France. The search results for ‘Adolphe Valette’ in the French language Wikipedia rank his modest entry just above a re-direct to Adolph Hitler. Born in Saint Étienne, Valette … Continue reading
Not Being There… Venice and the Architecture Biennale
by Herbert Wright If you were at the Venice Architecture Biennale opening, you may have found me there, but only if you had a QR reader. My voice speaks from a Kowloon neighbourhood in a film at the Hong Kong … Continue reading
The Other Site 