Posts Tagged United Kingdom
‘London’s British Museum is a map of the world, and a time machine too’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Our architecture correspondent celebrates London's most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum – at once a map of the world, a time machine and a treasure chest
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Simon Jenkins on the Tower of London
My walks to the British Museum as a young boy must have been as much a visual and emotional education as they were an untiring thrill. The time I spent there as a child is probably one of the reasons I came to travel so much to remote spots and folds of the atlas in later years.
The museum itself is a map of the world, a time machine, too, offering mind trips to Mesopotamia, Memphis, Athens in the golden age of Pericles and to an encyclopedia of compelling civilisations, or haunting fragments of them. Here, dreams of exotic places, peoples and buildings were brought to kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional and mesmerising life.
I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.
Beyond – up the most generous flight of steps – lay the museum itself, and its compelling collections veiled by a great Greek Revival pediment at the centre of an ambitious colonnade of no fewer than 44 Ionic columns, their design based, as I learned much later, on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor (now western Turkey).
There was all this to take in even before walking through the doors into the echoing lobby and deciding whether to turn left – into the dark realm of Egyptian mummies and Assyrian gateways guarded by warriors who were half adventurously bearded men and half vigorous blue ceramic bulls – or right into the Corinthian light of the King's Library, with its double-deck rows of gold-embossed leather spines.
Here I could stare at the pencilled pages of Scott's Diary, not knowing that one day I would hold this most moving of documents in my own, white-gloved, hands, turning its heart-rending pages.
I enjoyed the gloom of the Duveen Gallery, built just before the second world war to designs by the American architect John Russell Pope, where the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon frieze – were on display. I was ignorant then of the controversy around these "stolen" sculptures and the desire of many modern Greeks to see them returned.
I learned to love Sydney Smirke's circular Reading Room set under an iron-ribbed dome in a courtyard of his elder brother's Grecian pantechnicon. Robert Smirke had travelled extensively in Greece and Sicily to sketch the ruins of ancient temples before he turned his cool mind and his elegant hand to the design of what is today, in terms of visitor numbers, Britain's most popular tourist attraction.
What has changed since I was a child? Renovations, extensions, and the exodus of the British Library to Colin St John Wilson's red-brick monument alongside the fairytale Gothic of the Midland Grand Hotel and St Pancras station, Norman Foster's roofed-over Great Court and, most of all, the sheer number of people tramping through the museum's halls and galleries, so many that the last time I came to look at collections from ancient Mesopotamia I was all but swept away on a tide of visitors: the gallery I had chosen has become one of many intensely busy thoroughfares in the museum.
It can be too busy for its own good. And yet anyone who is tired of the British Museum is tired not just of tourism or the crush of central London, but of the entire world and the history of its civilisations captured here in untiring architectural splendour.
• Admission to the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 (020-7323 8299, britishmuseum.org) is free
‘The surrounding modern buildings show no respect for the Tower of London’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
The iconic 11th-century citadel that is the Tower of London, with its ancient walls, streets, steps and turrets, has been let down by a towering failure of City planners, says Simon Jenkins
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Bad news. Unesco may soon strip London's two most prominent tourist sites, Westminster's Parliament Square and the Tower of London in the City of their world heritage status. Chief reason is the towering Shard, which will be western Europe's tallest building, now looming over both of them from its launch pad on the south side of London Bridge. Westminster's grouping of Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Whitehall is probably far enough away to survive the shock. The Tower of London is a different matter.
The rough-and-tumble old citadel has become such a London familiar that few people really know it. William the Conqueror's White Tower still sits nobly in the centre of the composition, sadly deprived of the original limewash that gave it its name. Inside are the original apartments, two chambers to each floor, and a Norman chapel. In the basement is a magnificent armoury museum. This remains the finest 11th-century structure in Britain.
On the river side of the Tower is Traitor's Gate and a suite of medieval chambers fitted out for Henry III (who kept a zoo in the grounds). This mini-palace has been recreated, complete with throne room and peaceful oratory looking out over the Thames – a serene view touched by the sadness of those passing to their deaths beneath.
Within this palace runs the last medieval street in London, a maze of ancient walls, steps and turrets. Here are the Bloody Tower, Raleigh's prison chambers, the Crown Jewels and the "leads" where Princess Elizabeth walked and contemplated death or coronation during the reign of her Catholic half-sister, Mary. The Tower enclave as a whole is a remarkable medieval town within a town. When inside, we can just about lose ourselves in Beefeaters, ravens, blood, guts and history.
Until the 1960s Tower Hill, overlooking the tower itself, was surrounded by the buildings, mostly warehouses, of a working Georgian and Victorian city. Most eye-catching of all, Tower Bridge, designed by the City architect, Horace Jones, in 1886, rose downstream in deference to the tower itself. The most famous bascule bridge in the world and still working, it perfectly complements the battlements and vigour of the Conqueror's fortress. Visitors can climb it and look down on river and city beneath, getting a closer and more evocative view than from the big wheel upstream.
That is about it. As Unesco rightly suggests, no city in Europe has shown less concern for the setting of its historic buildings than London. St Katherine's Dock just downstream of the bridge has been partly restored, but its tower facade is wrecked by an overwhelming glass box by Lord Rogers, and by the appalling concrete Tower Hotel. Whoever allowed this to be put up should be shot, and one day I assume it will be taken down.
Across the river lies the benighted site of warehouses cleared in the 1970s and left fallow as planners argue over what to do next. Had the waterfront been restored, as happened downstream in Wapping, this area would have been yielding rent and jobs for a quarter of a century. That is the true cost of so-called redevelopment.
Directly opposite the Tower is the mayor of London's oval building designed by Lord Foster and described by former mayor Ken Livingstone as a "glass testicle". It lurches strangely towards the river with, to its right, the frigid More London development. Meanwhile, on the north bank upstream of the Tower, is a giant atrium block also by Foster, blundering across the contour.
These buildings show not the slightest respect for the Tower or Tower Bridge. They are monuments only to insipid steel and glass.
• Admission to the Tower of London (0844 482 7799, hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon) from £17 adults and £9 children, if booked online
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and chairman of the National Trust
Will Self: why I hate London’s Trafalgar Square
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Controversial novelist Will Self thinks Trafalgar Square is an ultra-naff London landmark that would be improved with market stalls, cafes and Lord Nelson being cut down to size
Simon Jenkins on The Tower of London
Jonathan Glancey on the British Museum
Without a shadow of doubt Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. The fact that massed divisions of tourists feel compelled to ritually promenade across its pigeon-shat-upon York stone and head-banging granite is perverse in the extreme, because it's not so much a place to hang out as somewhere you feel constantly in danger of being hung for treason, such is the discourse of power enshrined in its leonine and general-studded plinths and its admiral-spiked column.
True, the National Gallery makes a pleasing non-event horizon for the square as you enter it from Whitehall or the Mall; a long range of neoclassicism, with its Saracen's helmet dome, it's bare to the point of Moorishness. St Martin-in-the-Fields is also difficult to object to unless you've a perverse inclination against its unexceptionable architecture and illustrious history of beneficence.
However, surrounding the rest of it are tedious Edwardian-club-bore buildings – South Africa House, Canada House and the rest – that underawe with their weighty bombast.
There's this, and there's the perverse cant of the square, which rises south-west to north-east to form a raked stage upon which something ought to happen. What usually happens on it is that organs of the state corral one group of malcontents or other before hitting them with sticks, riding over them on horseback, and on one or two notable occasions – such as the original Bloody Sunday of 1887 – render some of them appropriately stone-dead.
Of course, barring the occasional demonstration, the Square doesn't have much happening in it at all, apart from full-grown Italian men with goatees climbing on to the backs of Landseer's lions, and giant Scandinavian teens rolling up their jeans and wading in the fountains until authority spurts them out.
Yes, yes, I know: mayors of all stripes put on concerts there, and also erect big screens on which events of some sort or other are displayed. I've seen this sort of carry-on when I cross the square – usually bottom-left to top-right – on my way to the opera, Soho and other more interesting destinations.
Trafalgar Square is so compellingly naff that it was the obvious location for that repulsive Olympic countdown clock – as it is annually for that enormous fir tree the Norwegian people insist on sending us – even though we've asked them very politely not to.
Who was it who said, "Corridors have become destinations"? Ah, yes, Rem Koolhaas in his seminal 2002 essay Junkspace – but he could've been talking about Trafalgar Square, at least since the completion of Admiralty Arch in 1912. Prior to that the square was … well, less square for a start. And it also had housing facing directly on to it – some distinctly ducal, such as Northumberland House, but others that were a recognisable part of the old bricky weave of London. It had housing, and even quite modest shops – now all that's left of the commercial activity that once gave the capital its distinctive street life is a Tesco Express, a Waterstone's and, further along towards Pall Mall, the offices of various implausible Central Asian airlines with names like GhengisAir.
Yes, once the Arch was overarching and the Mall came into being (prior to 1912 it was a long row of hedges), Trafalgar Square became a corridor that was a destination, by which I mean it was a site to be visited rather than lived in. Dead and about-to-be-married royals must be dragged through its environs as part of a kissing of the ritual stations of the state's holy cross – winning sports teams ditto.
Almost all attempts to gussy up the Square and make it more user-friendly – think the Fourth Plinth new sculptures, and the pedestrianisation of the northern side – are doomed to failure, precisely because of its bombast and the petrified generals laughing stonily in the face of anything light, frothy or fun.
Of the recent Fourth Plinth sculptures only Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant has gone any way towards bending the square's rectilinear rigidity. With its subversion of the conventionally standardised representations of the body the square specialises in, and its bright white marble – the albedo of which attracted a good proportion of the flying rats – Quinn's statue made a stab at the flinty heart of the Brit establishment.
Unfortunately it couldn't possibly penetrate far enough. What's needed are cafes all over the gaff, open-air and serving excellent espresso; top-notch strolling and – unlicensed – buskers; Horatio's nob chopped off halfway down; at least one of the lions upended; an open-air market; some good ethnic food stalls; and possibly a snake charmer or 20 …
Overall, think Marrakech's Djemaa el-Fna and you wouldn't be far wrong. Oh, and did I mention the weather?
Will Self's novel Umbrella will be published by Bloomsbury in August
A Room for London: a new installation and hotel on the South Bank
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
Liz Bird was one of the first guests to spend the night at A Room for London, a 'holiday houseboat' architectural installation on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall overlooking the Thames. It will be open for bookings to the rest of us this Thursday
Ship's log, Roi des Belges: Sunday 15 January, 2012. Time: 4pm. Weather: fine. Wind: south-westerly.
Crew safely on board and feeling very pleased with themselves, standing on the top deck sipping prosecco and waving at promenaders on the South Bank as they admire the Thames river views from Big Ben round to St Paul's. It has been an unusual embarkation, via a backstage door at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and up a specially installed lift to the roof.
Resembling a 1920s steamer and designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, the Roi des Belges interior is red-stained plywood with not a nautical blue and white stripe in sight. The spacious main deck's bow is lined with windows and a wraparound wool banquette. There's a massive bed, which cleverly converts into twin beds by sliding on runners built into the floor.
Behind is a table and chairs next to a kitchenette. A shower room and toilet – with portholes giving views of St Paul's or the London Eye – straddle the entrance hall at the back of the boat, or "stern".
The pièce de resistance is the snug upper deck, filled with London-themed books, which we quickly rename "The Bridge" and where we write up the ship's log. This weighty tome is where guests who managed to secure a night's stay when bookings went live last September (six months' worth of bookings snapped up in 12 minutes) are expected to chart their experience. Fountain pen provided.
Alain de Botton is the philosopher behind Living Architecture, the foundation which rents out unusual holiday homes and came up with the idea for the project. He put "demons", as his 3am log entry under the heading "sightings" when he stayed earlier this month. Our entry for the same hour reads: "Man, singing loudly, zig-zags across Waterloo Bridge".
Later this month, the boat will host its first "artist in residence", the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird who will play a one-off gig via live webcast (28 January). Other musicians such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson will also perform, and writers including Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson will take part in A London Address there, a series of monthly writings and recordings .
We use our binoculars to study the faces of those beneath us on the South Bank: lovers, strollers, joggers. We are constantly drawn to the "vessel" opposite. As night falls, the opulent Savoy hotel lights up like a jewelled beacon, its crystal interiors shining out over the inky Thames.
Ship's log: 5pm. A police launch, its sirens blaring, speeds along the water, dodging the packed tourist boats. Trains rattle over Hungerford Bridge, snatches of conversation drift upwards, a saxophone wails plaintively.
Ship's log: 11.26pm. Crew retires for the night. Blinds are left untouched, but sleep doesn't come quickly. We keep sitting up and looking out at London's multi-coloured riverside.
Monday, 16 January. Ship's log: 7am. the sun has just risen. On the starboard side, The Shard pierces a pinky red sky.
Ship's log: 11am. Binoculars stowed, log up to date, crew disembarks, wishing their "trip" could have been longer.
• Be warned, the first sale of nights in the boat, for between January and June, sold out in just 12 minutes. Bookings for July to December will go on sale online this Thursday, 19 January, at midday GMT. A Room for London (aroomforlondon.co.uk, living–architecture.co.uk) sleeps two and costs £300 for a night, one night maximum
Art and culture at the British seaside
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 3, 2011
From fairytale castles to Margate's modern art, there's lots to keep you busy when the weather drives you from the beach
Visiting the British seaside is best done in an opportunistic rush, packing a bucket and spade and heading for the station on a sunny morning. If you plan a longer stay, you're braving the elements. Rain, cloud ... sun? But one form of seaside weather insurance is art. Several masterpieces of art and architecture are scattered around the British coastline, offering extra reasons to head for the beach and alternative entertainment when sandcastle building is rained off. Here are my top seaside wonders.
Should you be swimming at Llandudno, Wales's well-preserved Victorian resort where Lewis Carroll once frolicked, you only have to cross the Great Orme headland – itself an archaeological landscape – to see Conwy castle, one of the most romantically situated and splendidly built of all medieval ruins. Painted by Turner, ornamented with a gothic suspension bridge by Thomas Telford, this is the perfect castle. But it is not the only one on the Welsh shore. Harlech and Beaumaris offer variants on the same mix of seaside fun and medieval history.
A complete contrast is Tate St Ives, a modern pavilion overlooking one of Cornwall's most beautiful beaches. Visitors to St Ives can enjoy the works of British abstract artists who based themselves in the area, along with contemporary art that offers challenge and provocation among the ice-creams. There is also the moving – in fact, melancholy – Barbara Hepworth studio.
Why does the tradition of sea bathing exist at all? It has a lot to do with 18th-century hedonists such as the Prince Regent, later George IV, who pioneered not only sea bathing but the accumulation of entertainments at coastal resorts. The timeless problem of the British seaside – how to keep the fun going when the sun disappears – has encouraged everything from gambling to ghost trains. The Prince Regent and his decadent courtiers set the tone with card games and balls at Brighton, and the oriental pavilion he built for his pleasure is one of Britain's architectural marvels. Brighton Royal Pavilion is at once a masterpiece of Arabian Nights fantasy, and the ancestor of every coin-machine arcade.
Along the coast from Brighton, southern resorts still compete to lure London crowds and many seek to do so with modern art. You can see new art in superb new buildings at Margate and Eastbourne.
Hastings, meanwhile, offers a coastal walk to the scene of one of the most beautiful paintings of the British coast, William Holman Hunt's Our English Coasts (1852). You can stand on the cliffs where he painted his lurid vision of grass, rocks, sea and sky, and observe that his intense colours are true to the natural beauty of this place.
Works of artistic and architectural excellence abound on the coastline – but maybe the greatest work of art is the shore itself.
London walking tour: Glancey’s art | Interactive
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 15, 2010
Architecture critic Jonathan Glancey reveals the hidden gems around Oxford Circus that exist above the shop windows
The pick of Europe’s art deco hotels
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 6, 2010
The best-preserved art deco hotels from Devon to Prague
Burgh Island Hotel, Devon
This art deco gem was built in 1929 and has been restored to recapture its 1930s heyday. Look out for retro radios, authentic furniture, original pictures, news clippings and archive photographs.• Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon (01548 810514, burghisland.com). Doubles from £360, including breakfast and dinner
Hotel Martinez, Cannes
Hollywood stars flock to the Hotel Martinez during the film festival each year. It is an unmistakable white, seven-storey art deco building right on the Croisette, and is said to house the most expensive suite in the world.• 73 La Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France (+33 492 987300, hotel-martinez.com). Doubles from £130
Hotel Britania, Lisbon
The Britania was built in the 1940s by Portuguese architect Cassiano Branco, and is the only hotel to survive the turbulence of the Estado Novo era. The bar features original wall paintings, cork floor and furnishings, and the hotel even has a vintage barbershop.• Rua Rodrigues Sampaio 17, 1150-278 Lisbon, Portugal (+351 213 155016, heritage.pt). Doubles from £114
Art Deco Imperial Hotel, Prague
This listed monument was built in 1913-14 and restored in 2005-07, and features an art deco exterior and late‑art nouveau interior. The imposing entrance hall and restaurant boast original tiled walls, mosaic ceilings, decorative pillars and a grand marble staircase.• Na Porici 15, 11000 Prague 1, Czech Republic, (+420 246 011600, hotel-imperial.cz). Doubles from £96
Conwy castle, a towering achievement
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 5, 2010
The painter's favourite is a triumph of the gothic mind that inspires awe at the power and intelligence of its creators
Conwy castle in north Wales has been portrayed by more artists than even the most swaggering eighteenth-century aristocrat. As you enter the castle today, some of these watercolours and paintings are blown up on the staircase to the ticket office and shop. Even without the cue of JMW Turner's romantic view, and even with modern traffic hurtling over the road bridge beneath the castle, no eye can fail to see the picturesque qualities of this punchy assembly of high walls and round turrets squatting giant-like on its high rock above a walled town. The fishing boats bob in the green water, while vistas of Welsh mountains recede in the distance. Nor can any heart fail to leap.
Inside, the picturesque first impressions grow into awe at the power and intelligence of the 13th-century king and masons who created this medieval architectural glory.Conwy is the military and secular equivalent of the great cathedrals – a triumph of the gothic mind. Looking up from inside one of its hollowed-out towers, you are stunned to see the sky above framed by a perfect circle of stone, with the crowning top turret a second, equally accurate, circle set on its parent like a cog wheel. How did medieval builders create such precise geometries? My guess is with nothing more complex than a pegged string, mapping the circle on the ground then building straight up. When you look at the base of the walls from outside, you discover that they grow out of the rock: crude but effective.
Other details are anything but crude. The stone vault beams of the great hall, of which only one survives, and the remains of its stained glass window match the sinuous decoration of the chapel tower's interior. This was a royal castle, and behind its formidable defences boasted the finery of a palace or abbey. Luckily, it fell into disrepair soon enough that it avoided becoming a manor house in Renaissance times or being converted into a Georgian gothic hideaway.
It was never modernised, in other words, and yet its stones, so massively gathered, survived remarkably well. This makes Conwy a truly stirring place: a medieval time capsule, with not a hint of fakery or false restoration about it.
This building is both practical and lovely. So here's a question. Why did castles stop being beautiful? Because of gunpowder, which blasted great holes in Conwy's near neighbour Rhuddlan castle. Fortifications could no longer afford to be picturesque in the era of cannon. Instead they became angular earthworks with sloping gun towers. The bunker-like forms of Renaissance bastions, which resisted artillery fire, evolved into the actual bunkers and trenches of the first and second world wars. Fortifications are still raised: what else is the green zone in Iraq if not a castle? But it is not beautiful.
High design, low price: UK holiday homes
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2010
Alain de Botton's set of cutting-edge, affordable holiday homes is bringing modernism to the masses
The experience of spending a night in an architect-designed space is limited usually to those lucky enough to own one, or to afford a top-end boutique hotel. The philosopher Alain de Botton and a group of top architects are hoping to change this with his latest project, a series of contemporary and, he says, affordable holiday homes in the UK, designed by renowned architects. The aim is to persuade the less elevated among us to spend the weekend and return home more enthusiastic about modernism.
"We want people to discover what it's like to live, eat and sleep in an architect-designed house," says de Botton, who got the idea while writing The Architecture of Happiness. "Most modern buildings are in private hands, or tend to be places one passes through – airports, offices." I don't know; I've slept in a few airports in my time.
The not-for-profit enterprise, called Living Architecture, is a self-styled "educational body". As such, it is hoping that its prices will attract ordinary, non design-savvy people to its high-design houses. On a mid-week night during low season (November or February, say) you can stay for £20 a night per person, but prices rise to £65 a night per person for peak periods. Both costs are on the proviso you can fill every one of eight beds, so not suited to a weekend getaway for a couple.
First I head to Suffolk to see the Balancing Barn, which will be the first house to open, at the end of this month. It's extraordinary. From the front it looks like a small bungalow, but from the side, you can see it's a long silver barn – covered in reflective steel tiles – that hangs dramatically off the edge of a slope like the bus in The Italian Job. It even sways a little if you jump up and down in the living room. Mark Robinson, the director of Living Architecture, gives us a demonstration. "It used to be even livelier!"
The setting is exceptionally peaceful. The house, designed by Dutch firm MVRDV, is a few miles inland from Walberswick. It is surrounded by pine trees and wild plum trees. A disguised trap door fit for a Bond villain opens on to a cobbled terrace directly underneath the cantilevered living room. A swing hangs off the end.
Inside it's clad in timber. An expensive-looking open-plan kitchen – "it's actually only Miele", says Mark (they're keen not to be branded too high-end) – has floor-to-ceiling windows and designer crockery. It leads on to a long, light-filled hallway with wooden joists that slice diagonally across the windows. All four double bedrooms sit in a row off the hall. They are filled with tricksy digital art that references Constable and Gainsborough, bespoke beds, bespoke carpets and more geometric woodwork. All have en suite showers, and two have baths by the foot of the bed.
But it's the large living space that opens out at the end of corridor – the bit that hangs off the edge – that provides the wow-factor I'd been waiting for. A huge floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooks woods, meadows and a pond. And taking up most of the floor, like a large rug, is a glass window with a big drop below.
The room is spare. A TV is hidden away, shelves are empty except for one groaning with de Botton's entire works. It reminds me of a lobby of an advertising agency.
"We want people to take away ideas when they come and stay," says Mark. But I wonder whether spending a week here would instil in me a love of modern architecture. For all its showmanship, the Balancing Barn is a cold space, and a little isolated. Once inside and enjoying your break, it would be easy to forget its extrenal appearance.
How will they ensure that a wide range of people stay in their houses? In short, they're not sure. "There is a risk that only the demographic already interested in modern architecture will be drawn to them," Mark says. "But I think the interest is there. We're not trying to shock people – we've received lots of encouraging comments from locals and passers-by."
A few miles away on the coast is the Dune House, an altogether more inviting prospect. The location is sublime. It sits on a shingle beach a five-minute stroll from Thorpeness, with views of empty dunes, the beach, the North Sea and a vast sky.
The ground floor walls are almost entirely made of glass, the dunes rising up to the window ledges on the sides, giving the impression you are nestled within them. The first floor is clad in black timber, and the roof has four asymmetrical peaks clad in a rust-coloured steel. But it doesn't look out of place: the pointy roof and the steel are designed to mimic the terracotta tiles and gables on neighbouring roofs.
Inside, like the Balancing Barn, it's minimalist, but here it feels cosy and simple, softer somehow. Mark shows us round, saying architecty things such as "cupboards would have destroyed the space". Personally, I quite like cupboards. But instead, the four upstairs bedrooms each contain just a double bed, a freestanding bath located at just the right height for sea-gazing, and lots of pegs on the timber-lined walls to hang stuff. Downstairs, it's largely open plan, with a dining table, and a sofa huddled round a dramatic sunken pit. You can walk outside straight on to the beach.
The house, which opens in December, is designed by Norwegian architects Jarmund/Vigsnaes, apparently known for their "creative responses to the highly seasonal Nordic landscape". I think this means their houses are good in cold weather, and the Dune House is furnished with under-floor heating and a cosy log-burning stove to stave off those chilly easterly winds. It's a house to hunker down in, to get out the Scrabble and whisky, light the stove and settle in for the night with a gale blowing outside.
A few days later, I'm off to Kent. The Shingle House is a modern take on a wooden fisherman's cottage on other-worldly Dungeness beach in Kent, and opens next month. Actual fishermen live next door, fourth generation. It's practically my dream house: simple lime-washed timber walls, vintage furniture, four cosy bedrooms that sleep eight, sunken bath, wood-burning stove and a snug mezzanine with a huge window that overlooks the eerie landscape out to sea and, on a clear day, France.
The house is designed by young and hip NORD Architecture in Glasgow. It is the least architecturally demanding of the three, yet I took more delight in its clever details. The internal courtyard with slatted screens that pivot so you can angle them against the ever-present wind; and the fact that each room is designed around the time of day it catches the sun.
The existing cottage, complete with smoke house, was demolished. The Shingle House has been built on the same footprint to keep the planners happy, who wanted to retain the appearance of three separate buildings.
It's understandable: there are no holiday homes on Dungeness to speak of, and residents are fiercely protective of their beautiful, hostile landscape. It's a desolate expanse, dotted with boats and huts and a couple of lighthouses, overlooked by Dungeness power station. Tourists come to stare at Derek Jarman's garden, a stone's throw away.
Two more holiday homes open next year: the first, a medieval hall-type structure with a vast timber roof in Cockthorpe, Norfolk, designed by Michael and Patty Hopkins; the second, a monastic retreat in concrete near Salcombe, south Devon, by Peter Zumthor. After that, they plan to open one a year.
Guests staying in these extraordinary new houses may well be designers, architects and creative types from London. Or Living Architecture may succeed in its laudable aim of finding a wider audience. But either way, they are a welcome addition to the UK holiday home scene.
• Living Architecture (living-architecture.co.uk). Prices for a four-night mid-week break start from £725 (the Balancing Barn), £625 (the Shingle House) and £760 (the Dune House)
St Paul’s Cathedral has risen above its critics for 300 years | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 1, 2011
The subject of scorn at its inception, St Paul's is an unlikely but successful marriage of medieval and Renaissance
St Paul's Cathedral was barely a year old when the attacks began. What we accept as one of the greatest of all British buildings, crowned with one of the most inspiring domes of all, was suspicious and even meretricious stuff if you happened to be Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. In his "Letter Concerning the Arts, or Science of Design" published in 1712, this prominent Whig politician condemned what he saw as an excessive and even vulgar form of design – Christopher Wren's very English baroque – not least because this voluptuous style was associated with Rome and all things Catholic and was therefore a very bad thing indeed in staunchly Protestant England.
Poor Wren. By the time his cathedral was declared complete, 300 years ago this week, (the official opening was held as early as 1697; detailed work on the great City of London cathedral continued until the early 1720s), his style was both out of fashion and politically incorrect. The most influential of the young critics to take up Cooper's attack was Colen Campbell, a Scottish architect whose book Vitruvius Britannicus, first published in 1715, condemned English baroque while not quite daring to put the boot into Wren. Instead, Campbell published an engraving of his own Palladian design for an ideal Protestant church alongside St Paul's; the reader was clearly meant to side with Campbell's model of chastely classical rectitude.
The Luftwaffe attacked St Paul's in no uncertain terms in 1940, but that was a physical assault and, thank God (Protestant, Catholic or otherwise) did precious little harm considering the scale of the bombing during the blitz. A bigger boot was put in half a century later by, of all people, Maxwell Hutchinson, then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Hutchinson's case was that St Paul's had always been a preposterous design because it was really a medieval English cathedral – one that happened to be built between 1675 and 1711 – that only masqueraded as a baroque temple. It was fakery on a huge scale. If you care to look behind its high nave walls, you will even find that the saucer-style Renaissance stone vaults you see by looking up from inside the cathedral are supported by flying buttresses, one of the defining characteristics of medieval cathedrals.
So, Wren had been all over the place, bodging together a design that we are right to question even today, 300 years after those early debates on whether or not the baroque was Papist devilry and, therefore, un-English as well as anathema. In a way, the Hutchinson line – one that has been argued before and since by those who have dared to call Wren's architectural genius into question – makes sense. St Paul's is indeed a marriage, holy or not, of medieval and Renaissance design. In Wren's defence, however, there had been little or no alternative.
Left to his own devices, Wren would have shaped a beautiful Greek cross-style Protestant temple without a hint of compromise. There is, and never has been, a building like this in Britain. But his patrons – the church commissioners – wanted something more recognisably cathedral-like. Wren fused his vision of a grand baroque temple with theirs of an updated English medieval cathedral (free of Catholic excess, of course), and held the result together with a dome that is at once an engineering marvel and an utterly sublime design. In achieving this extraordinarily difficult compromise, Wren had not just tested his genius to the limits, but realised the most monumentally discreet of all English compromises. And, in doing so he had created a building that holds an appeal to people of so many backgrounds and walks of life today.
More than this, he managed – again employing design genius and compromise in equal measures – to surround his cathedral with a constellation of parish churches that form (even in an age of cloud-scraping Gherkins, Cheesegraters, Shards and Walkie-Talkies) a lovely architectural necklace around his peerless dome. For any of you in doubt, go and climb up into, around and above Wren's dome and then tell me he did something wrong. Perhaps St Paul's is not a pure work of art. It is certainly very different to the exquisite baroque churches of Rome that must have caught his eye in books of engravings. Somehow, though, 300 years on St Paul's retains both its serene majesty and sense of being, although a compromise as big as any yet made, as English as Salisbury, Wells or Lincoln Cathedrals.
As for Wren, did he really care what critics thought? He was nearly 90 when St Paul's was declared complete in 1711 and, as he had survived so many attacks and even attempts to oust him, perhaps criticism was simply water off an old architect's frockcoat. As the insouciant old Clerihew goes:
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