Page 10 - Peter Smithson News Today

" " Unité dHabitation in Marseille is arguably the most influential Brutalist building of all time. Its also one of 17 projects by 20th-century French architect Le Corbusier to be added to UNESCOs list of internationally significant architecture sites. Flickr/Denis Esakov/(CC 3.0) Strike up a conversation about the worlds most beautiful buildings, and it might be a while before anyone mentions an example of Brutalist architecture. There could be numerous French buildings on the list like...

Words by John Jervis For better or worse, the visual arts haven’t featured large in Britain’s national mythologies of late. Yet, in September 2018, Theresa May launched what is now known as Festival UK* 2022, proclaiming: ‘Just as millions of Britons celebrated their nation’s great achievements in 1951, we want to showcase what makes our country great today.’ This ‘Festival of Brexit’ was met with scorn, hilarity and anger among artistic communities – followed, last year, by inf...

Apollo. The exhibition, currently closed due to Covid-19 restrictions, is scheduled to run until 6 June.  In the aftermath of the Second World War, a split emerged between European architects about how the reconstruction of cities might best be realised: several northern European architects, among them the Dutchman Aldo van Eyck, advocated for building that took into account human patterns of association within new and specifically designed forms; the other attitude, represented by an Italian,...

HIS work is known all around the world and here in Scotland the architect Enric Miralles will forever be remembered as the man who brought us the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood, which can still trigger as much debate now as it did when it opened, four years after his death. Love it or loathe it, the building, with its roof of upturned boats and striking – if unusual – window frames, is regarded by many as the Catalan architect’s finest work and is featuring in a tribute orga...

Some achieve distinction in one or possibly two branches of the world of art, but few, if any, are outstanding in all of them. Alan Bowness – art historian, curator and museum director, critic and journalist, and a collector himself – was just such a man, for all his personal modesty and quiet public profile. What drove him was his love for, and thirst for knowledge of, 19th- and 20th-century art – painting and sculpture especially. This allowed him to become one of the most effective pro...

Drawing Matter Writing Prize 2021 2020 winners The Drawing Matter Trust has launched a second writing contest featuring a £4,000 prize fund [Deadline: 1 June 2021] The competition – now in its second year – invites people aged over 18 to submit a short essay that explores the role of drawings in the ‘process of design, and the buildings or objects they represent’. Advertisement The call for submissions aims to generate a number of texts that respond to items within the Drawing Matter c...

Copy It’s true that all trends are circular, and what was once seen as old and outdated becomes new and modern again- in fashion, music, art, and especially architecture. From the mid 20th century, brutalist architecture rose in popularity before reaching its peak in the mid-1970s, when it was disregarded for being too stylistic and non-conforming to the needs of clients who wanted their buildings to feel timeless. But the love for these concrete beasts is facing a resurgence, and a renewed a...

Given the ancient character of the craft, architecture school is a comparatively recent cultural phenomenon. Emerging from a soup of pupillage, guild-based apprenticeships and enthusiastic amateurship, the idea that you could train architects away from the building site only really took form in 17th-century France, when the Académie Royale d’Architecture (later the École des Beaux-Arts) offered the first properly academic training for would-be Ictinuses. Since its founding, architectural pe...