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There's something more than a little strange about the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. He was a modernist who seemed at his most creative when working with historic buildings (rather than [...]

The Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz (1935-2011) once said to me, during a conversation about a drawing he was working on, that there were two worlds. One was the world we [...]

There was affine when architects warned to be intellectuals. Bored of the banalities of late modernism, struggling to build in an unsympathetic environment and seduced by French theory, they forged [...]

Try to wander into the grand entrance of the British Museum and you will find yourself waylaid in a snaking corridor of crowd barriers and then a small white tent [...]

When Baron Haussmann drove his new avenues through the old streets of Paris, smashing through the barricade-friendly cobbled medieval alleys and dingy courts, he also created a new layer of [...]

The first brutalist building dates, in my opinion, not from the 1950s, has nothing to do with Le Corbusier or the Smithsons and was designed not by an architect but [...]

We have become used to the white stone cliffs of the museums on Washington's National Mall--neoclassical, over-scaled and austere--but it might all have looked very different. The very first of [...]

The Wiener Werkstatte's designs still epitomise turn-of-the-century Viennese modernism. The enterprise may have been a resounding commercial failure, but its works are as influential as ever In 1900 the architect [...]

If you have ever approached Termini station in Rome, you may have noticed a frieze on the edge of the slender canopy (Fig. l). It is quiet and subtle, a [...]

Ghost Parking Lot was one of the eeriest, most sinister and most striking pieces of 20th-century land art (Fig. 1). The lumpy shapes of automobiles were discernible beneath a gloopy [...]

As London's former industrial areas are being rapidly redeveloped, artists are being squeezed out of affordable studio space. But can a city be a thriving cultural centre if artists have [...]

It doesn't sound quite possible, but only now, 160 years after it was founded, does London's Victoria and Albert Museum have a dedicated furniture gallery. The museum's extensive furniture collections [...]

When the western wing of Paris's Palais de Tokyo reopened 10 years ago, the effect was electrifying. For decades the generously funcled galleries of Paris's bourgeois-boheme ('bobo') art scene had [...]

What, you might well ask, was the Commonwealth Institute for? This huge concrete structure just off Kensington High Street has been standing empty for a decade. I remember the odd [...]

'Building an item of furniture,' wrote Jean Prouve (1901-84), 'is no light matter.' This was a designer who took the construction of a chair as seriously as the building of [...]

London may be an art powerhouse, but when it comes to selling design it has always been strangely underpowered. The undisputed gravitational centre of the trade is, and always has [...]

Is the burden on the architecture of the gallery becoming more than its foundations can bear? Is it possible that we now ask so much of our new museums that [...]

The biggest domed stadium in the world, the biggest digital scoreboard in the world, the largest column-free space in the world, parking for 40,000 cars--the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium is [...]

Of all the elements of architecture, the one that has most clearly retained its original role of representation is the ceiling. We may know nothing of the symbolism of a [...]

Henry van de Velde--The Artist as Designer: From Art Nouveau to Modernism Richard Hollis Occasional Papers, 20 [pounds sterling] ISBN 9780995473058 On a recent visit to the new Bauhaus Museum [...]

A generation ago Lina Bo Bardi was not much known outside Brazil, and not much talked about. Today, notably in academia and architecture schools, she is arguably the most referenced [...]

The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century Mark Lamster Little, Brown US, 25 [pounds sterling] ISBN 9780316126434 Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was not a great [...]

Most architectural styles are pioneered by the wealthy. The villa, the mansion, the upmarket apartment block, the blockbuster cultural centre: these have been the vehicles for new architectures. The Amsterdam [...]

It is occasionally said that the age of the blockbuster museum is over. Then along comes the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Here, the French architect Jean Nouvel has conjured a stunning [...]

Bela Lajta is a name little known outside Budapest and, frankly, one not that well known there either. While other figures from the fin de siecle--Gaudf, Mackintosh, Loos, Wagner, Hoffmann--have [...]

It is 20 years since the Guggenheim Bilbao opened. Frank Gehry's building has been much praised, but how has the museum really changed the area and are there too many [...]

Stanton Williams' design for the Musee d'arts de Nantes is about stitching space for contemporary art into the solid, monumental historic building but it is also, perhaps more importantly, about [...]