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Tom de Paor, the former BD Young Architect of the Year, has been a fixture on the architectural scene for so long that it comes as a shock to discover [...]

Hatton Garden is one of the capital's most distinctive enclaves. Sited at the southern tip of the London Borough of Camden, it lies midway between the City and Westminster. Since [...]

Moored like an ocean liner on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Jean Nouvel-designed Musee du Quai Branly revealed its exotic cargo for the first time last Friday: a [...]

West Kensington is not the most welcoming part of London. Pockets of Victorian terraced streets are broken up by gated mansion blocks and post-war flats. The older terraces present a [...]

Everyone remembers their first visit to the Roundhouse, philanthropist client Torquil Norman explains. It's almost like the first time they had sex. It's been a seminal music and theatre venue [...]

When architect Vincent Harris was building his new Coliseum-like library for Manchester in the early 1930s, people speculated on what the circular excavations might be. Some suggested it was a [...]

The sociologist Richard Sennett defines the public realm as 'the place where you meet and interact with people who are unlike yourself'. It is an inspiring, if elusive, ideal. Even [...]

For a European, getting one's head round a place like the US city of Des Moines presents no small challenge. The Iowa state capital has built a booming economy as [...]

'I never see anything that I do' reflects architect Dante Vanoli of Purcell Miller Tritton, as he stands in Kew Gardens gazing at the front of Kew Palace in the [...]

Walking into Cambridge's vast Accordia development I suffered a ghastly spasm of recognition: it was here, 15 years ago, that I had come to sit my driving test. Although only [...]

In the run-up to this week's completion of its Woodward Place development in Manchester, Fat's media profile has risen exponentially. Practice partners, Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacobs have [...]

'There is no solution because there is no problem' wrote Ron Arad on a chair he exhibited during the Milan Furniture Fair this year. He is wrong because the furniture [...]

In 1943 Arne Jacobsen rowed across the Oresund from Copenhagen to Malmo to escape the Nazis. Prevented from working as an architect in Sweden, he began to work on fabrics, [...]

Eighteen months ago, it became official: we are fat and idle. The main man behind the nation's health, chief medical officer Liam Donaldson, aimed his sights squarely at our bellies [...]

Denise Scott Brown Architects must reassess modernism Although theories on modernism origins are numerous, there is agreement that it grew out of the Industrial Revolution, responding to technological change and [...]

The Architectural Association has always attracted students from a wide range of fantastical backgrounds but even by its standards Crispin Kelly must rank as one of its more singular alunmi. [...]

The Spanish painter Jose Beulas has spent a lifetime recording the landscape of Aragon in northeast Spain. His is an arid world of wintry skies and baked earth where the [...]

'Does this sound poncey?' asks Sarah Wigglesworth. She's talking about gravity and lightness, and the measurement of space through dimensions of physical movement, like walking up stairs. About how a [...]

Robert Musil opens his great Viennese novel The Man Without Qualities with reference to a barometric low holding over the Atlantic, one August day in 1913. From here he takes [...]

To the uninitiated the floor plans of Feilden Clegg Bradley's new Centre for Nanotechnology are opaque in the extreme. It is none too easy to imagine what goes on in [...]

Midway through the four years it took to realise Peter Barber Architects' designs for Donnybrook Quarter in the East End of London, the project ground to a halt. 'There was [...]

In the last few years a proliferation of one-off houses has sprung up across Britain in a wave of domestic innovation unseen since the 1930s. A combination of economic prosperity [...]

In the London of the early fifties, the cult of Le Corbusier enjoyed a modest but fanatical following. If you counted yourself among its number, two key sites of worship [...]

The moment in an architect's career when their work makes a jump in scale is always a heady one. Positions that bewitched when tested at the scale of a house [...]

What you see on these four pages is the fruit of the ninth BD/Zumtobel photo competition which gives Building Design readers the chance to show off their photo skills with [...]

The London 2012 Olympic bid has promised to 'leave behind world-class sports facilities' and 'transform one of the city's most underdeveloped areas into a model for sustainable urban development'. In [...]

Two centuries ago, Kirkstall Abbey was described as 'the most picturesque and beautiful ruin in the country'. Set in a green valley by the banks of the river Aire, the [...]

In 1959, a competition was held for the design of Churchill College in Cambridge. In his review of the submissions, entitled The Blenheim of the Welfare State, Colin Rowe noted [...]

'The Welsh,' said the Doctor, 'are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,'he said with disgust, [...]

Somewhere to the west of Berlin and south of Hamburg is Wolfsburg, a city that didn't exist until 1938. Designed as an urban manifestation of national socialist ideals, the city [...]

Eight months ago, I sat down with my editor and the chairman of the Young Architect of the Year judges, Paul Monaghan, to discuss the launch of the 2005 Young [...]

Hidden in a valley at the foot of the Comeragh Mountains, Glencomeragh House is a sanctuary from the trials of modern life. Winding up the back roads from Cork, I [...]

In June the Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati opened the Look2005 Arts festival in Aberdeen with a presentation of his three built works, two competition projects and a projected series of [...]

Fuzzy and fragmented, Ken Livingstone's high-rise policy is in danger of turning London into Shanghai-on-Thames BD's office is housed in a nine-storey block on the south side of the Thames. [...]

Nearly half a century ago, Nikolaus Pevsner found the centre of Leeds blessed with 'civic pride and a certain orderliness', the results of 'enlightened planning'. Pevsner didn't stray far from [...]

In the spring, London's Whitechapel Art Gallery stages an exhibition of the 10 public buildings that David Adjaye is due to complete over the next two years. In Britain it [...]

In museums the memorial role of architecture is brought to the fore. Everyone expects architectural rhetoric, so there is money available to escape mere utility in favour of something more [...]

Twenty years on, it is difficult to account for the ferocity of the argument over the future of Britain's built environment that raged in the 1980s. Although the debate became [...]

Bold beginning The 11th Earl De La Warr: My grandfather, the ninth Earl De La Warr, known as Buck throughout his life, was a man untypical of his time given [...]

Passing the Buffalo Bill Museum in Le Clair, Iowa, a dense network of Silos & Smokestacks heritage area sites and endless rows of cornfields, we are a long way from [...]

Long gone are the days when critics could safely pigeonhole architects: hi-tech was hi-tech, minimal was minimal and decon was decon. For Wilkinson Eyre, a straight descendant of hi-tech, to [...]

Ightham Mote might well be regarded as the perfect English dream house: a relic of Merrie England and a glimpse of the olden time. Rising from the placid waters of [...]

Harbour views in a city like Sydney are a constant of estate agent parlance. Likewise harbour glimpses, a distant prospect of a tiny patch of glittering blue criss-crossed by ferries [...]

The spectacular grade II-listed Firbeck Park in Yorkshire had been sitting forlorn, empty and decaying for more than a decade when thieves stole the lead from its roof earlier this [...]

I found myself struggling to reconcile two competing responses to this year's Stirling Prize shortlist. On the one hand, it evidently includes some very strong work. Indeed, building for building, [...]

In January of last year I flew to Dublin to review Tom de Paor's little utility building on the esplanade at Clontarf. I have to admit, at the time, I [...]

We have heard ad nauseum about the Guggenheim effect. Bilbao. Following the success of Gehry's Bilbao gallery, a desire for a built icon to represent renewal has filtered into most [...]

Johan Berglund Bartlett School, UCL Johan Berglund's scheme is for a paint factory on a site adjacent to the Royal Victoria Graving Dock in east London. Under the tutorship of [...]

The council staff and private service providers working in Southwark Borough Council's One Stop Shop seem slightly ill at ease. They have been cowering behind the bullet-proof glass for too [...]

Completion of the Dresden Synagogue in 2002 signalled the emergence of Wandel Hoefer Lorch & Hirsch as the leading German practice of its generation. Against the backdrop of a national [...]