Category Archives: Uncategorized
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
Confessions of an Architecture Critic
by Herbert Wright In 2018, architectural writing, mainly for Blueprint magazine, took me to 10 countries beyond the UK. In 2019, the same again. I sometimes reached Paris or Berlin by rail or bus, but usually the trips were by … Continue reading
City of the Singularity part 3: Hello, Bomb?
The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us into scenes that feel like science fiction films. Downtown streets are eerily deserted, shop staff look at us through shiny face visors, we watch vehicles spraying disinfectant across cities on the other side of … Continue reading
A spotlight on Shenzhen’s Urban Villages… and the future of cities
Shenzhen seems to be the ultra-modern super-scaled metropolis, but it also presents a very different urbanist model, one hidden in its urban villages. Continue reading
Our Proposal to Curate the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019: NO WAY BACK from the FUBuLoUS Team
In October 2017, I led a team to respond to an Open Call for Curator of Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) 2019. We called ourselves FUBuLoUS and our proposal was titled NO WAY BACK. OAT received 71 curatorial proposals from across … Continue reading
The Other Site 