Gabion - Hugh Pearman

This was the first museum. More than three centuries on, Oxford's Ashmolean has reinvented itself.

2009-10-01

There are museums, and then there is the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was the first of its kind, in 1683. The first purpose-built place to present a collection of interesting stuff, gathered from all over the world, to the public. Now the Ashmolean is about to reopen after a �61m expansion. So you have the entire 326-year history of a cultural phenomenon in one building. Worth a visit, I think.

Home advantage: how the famous old Arsenal stadium became a new London square.

2009-09-30

I sat high in the North Stand for one of Arsenal's last football matches - a patrician dismissal of Everton - at its old Highbury stadium in North London. The vastly bigger and blingier new Emirates Stadium was about to open nearby. What was going to happen to the old place, I asked as we queued for burgers and beer? They're going to convert it into housing, they said. The pitch is going to become a new London square. Oh sure, I thought. Like that's ever going to work.

A comic-opera stage-set: Britain's new Supreme Court is in a funny old building. That's the way we do things.

2009-09-20

Suppose you were French president Nicholas Sarkozy, and you had invented an important new top tier in your legal system. You need a building to house your �ber-judges in. Well, you know what would happen. Prime site, international architecture competition, thousands of entries, and the end result a glittering weirdly-shaped edifice that appears on television a lot. And in Britain? Oh, we just do up an old court building we've got handy and bung 'em in there. Job done.

The edges of things: meeting Sn�hetta in Oslo.

2009-07-07

At first, I think the taxi driver has taken a wrong turning. I'm in Oslo, and he's meant to be going to the studio of Norway's most internationally successful architects. But he seems to be getting lost somewhere down in a dockside industrial zone. Finally we fetch up at an unpromising cement-rendered shed. It boasts two logos: "Cod Farmers" and "Sn�hetta". That'll do.

A rock and a hard place: the New Acropolis Museum, Athens

2009-06-28

Up there on the rock of the Acropolis, that's the Parthenon. Down here on the lower slopes, that's the �110m New Acropolis Museum. Inside the museum is a lot of fascinating and very beautiful sculpture from the Acropolis, exquisitely presented. And in another museum 1,486 miles away, there's quite a lot too. At the British Museum, they prefer not to call them the Elgin Marbles these days, though it was our Lord Elgin - ambassador to the Ottoman Empire - who chiselled them off at the beginning of the 19th century and brought them to London. You may have heard that the Greeks want them back.

The dark knights return: four profoundly unfashionable buildings in London.

2009-06-06

Number One, Poultry, is an office and retail corner block at the heart of the City of London by James Stirling, first designed in 1985, but only completed posthumously by Michael Wilford in 1997. It is a good and interesting building, publicly permeable, multi-layered, the antidote to most commercial speculations of the time. But it is also 1980s post-modern (PoMo) in style. The style is not yet old enough to have come back into favour. So the big fat Pharaonic hen of Poultry - look, you can see the folded wings, and its beak, and it sits on a circular nest - must bide its time. It is generally regarded as a late aberration by a once-great architect. Besides, the design replaced an unbuilt slab by Mies van der Rohe, an architect openly worshipped by devotees. No, it is just not done, to like Number One Poultry.

Stirling of Stirlings: Mackintosh, the lion and the unicorn.

2009-06-01

Well, I'm surprised. When I asked you to vote online for the best British-designed building of the past 175 years, I imagined you might go for something ultra-modern and popular like the Gherkin or the Eden Project in Cornwall. Or - given that traditionalism is getting a lot of press right now - for something reassuringly old and solid. Like the Palace of Westminster, or the Natural History Museum. But you didn't do either. You went instead for a century-old masterpiece by a tragic genius that stands exactly between ancient and modern. Completed in 1909, it's the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. What does this say about our attitude to architecture today?

Sex, spies, the Beatles and the Mini: the original minimalist motor car.

2009-05-13

They nicknamed it "Sputnik", did the people charged with the task of designing and building the original Mini car. It was the end of 1957 and the eponymous Russian satellite, the world's first, had recently been launched. That tells you just how old this car is. They only finally stopped making it in October 2000. Since when, a bloated BMW has called itself MINI, but nobody is fooled: that's just an estate agents' runaround. Production of the real Mini started in May 1959. It is thus 50 years old, hence these books.

The amoebic house: Simon Conder returns to Dungeness.

2009-05-04

Dungeness is a large, roughly triangular shingle peninsula that extrudes from the south-eastern coast of Britain into the English Channel. It is home to a strange assortment of buildings and activities, from tiny fishermen's huts to a giant nuclear power station by way of lighthouses and a miniature steam railway. Once considered the back of beyond, it was a place of squatter communities. Today it is borderline fashionable, a nature reserve and a conservation area. It is here that architect Simon Conder has built his latest eccentric house.

Woke up on a Chelsea morning.... Ten things you need to know about that Richard Rogers/Prince Charles/Chelsea Barracks rumble

2009-04-19

In case you missed it, the twattish heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, has been caught out trying to subvert the planning process again - this time writing to the Qatari owners of the vast Chelsea Barracks site in west London, right next door to Wren's Royal Hospital - and very close, incidentally, to where Richard Rogers lives. A stonkingly enormous luxury housing scheme for the site, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour, is going through the real planning process. Meanwhile, in the Prince's murky shadow planning process, Charles was caught trying to persuade the Qataris to replace Rogers with his favoured neoclassicist, Quinlan Terry.

Guilt, industry, brutality, art - the reinvigorated Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End.

2009-04-06

The English middle classes have always loved the idea of throwing high culture at the masses. From the mid 19th century onwards, all kinds of energetic social reformers and philanthropists have made earnest attempts to prise theatre, opera, ballet, art, museum collections and intellectual discourse out of their elitist strongholds and set them up in working-class premises. In London, none has succeeded better than the Whitechapel Art Gallery at the heart of the East End. Now it has just reopened after an �13.5m expansion. As tendrils of gentrification coil through the area, is its mission still relevant?

Wall and piece: David Chipperfield, Julian Harrap and the Neues Museum, Berlin.

2009-03-16

In Berlin, there is a place called Museum Island. With stereotypical Prussian thoroughness, the five great museums and art galleries of the nation were all built together in this one place between 1825 and 1930. Badly damaged in the Second World War, they then found themselves on the wrong side of the Wall, their collections divided between East and West. Since reunification, this has been Germany's biggest cultural reconstruction project, a 1.5 billion Euro work in progress. It has led to a strange and wonderful architectural phenomenon, just completed: the Neues Museum, as restored by Brits.

Manhattan's High Line: I think it's going to be OK.

2009-02-25

I had worried. It's only natural. The lure of dereliction, its especial beauty, is its very isolation and tragic transience. By this token, the idea of turning the secret world of Manhattan's High Line into a linear, permanent public park could surely not succeed. But now I have walked the first, and nearest-complete, section. I am impressed and delighted. Unless it is overwhelmed by visitor numbers, this idea looks like it is going to work.

Monsieur Le Corbusier, meet Signor Palladio - how delightful to find you both in London. Sir Edwin Lutyens wants a word with you.

2009-02-16

It was that blistering 40 degrees plus European summer of 2003 when - since we were on holiday in Alsace - I bundled a puzzled family into the car and headed off through the Vosges mountains of eastern France to look at a small church on a hill in a semi-industrial landscape. I had wanted to see this building for decades. We arrived panting, heat-struck, ill-tempered. But not for long. We had entered the presence of greatness.

"Palladio was pass� in his own time": guest writer Francis Terry reassesses the master.

2009-01-29

Palladio-mania is just going too far. Last year I was invited to two Palladio parties on the same evening, one at the RIBA and the other at the Italian Embassy. Wherever I look I see articles, symposiums, exhibitions, publications, parties and even a church service to celebrate the great man's 500th anniversary. As a Palladian I should be pleased, but it is with a great sense of ennui that I sit down to write in praise of my favourite architect. I am also surprised by his universal acceptance, because by contemporary taste, he should be derided as a backward looking plagiarist with no ideas of his own.

At home with the modern Goths: Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.

2009-01-22

I once worked with the late Martin Pawley, a frequently perverse, never less than entertaining critic. One afternoon he returned from a visit to the Richard Rogers studio. How was it, I inquired? "Oh, you know," he said with an expansive gesture. "Troubadours strumming guitars in the corridors..."

How Welsh is Welsh architecture? And why aren't the English bothered?

2009-01-12

Sir Simon Jenkins, who began his starry and pithily opinionated journalistic career writing for Country Life magazine in the 1960s, is happily letting his conservationist sideline take over his life. After two earlier volumes in this series, devoted respectively to English churches and houses, the publication of his latest volume on all kinds of buildings in Wales coincides with his taking over as chairman of The National Trust. This means he is now actually in charge of a large chunk of the heritage he writes about. It's a rare privilege.

From Empire State to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre: how recessions produce fine architecture.

2009-01-06

There's nothing like a recession for bringing architecture back to its senses. With less being built, there's time to think. Overblown stylings are out the window. New Puritanism stalks the streets. By and large, this is a good thing. For instance, the last recession brought down the curtain on the unlamented ticky-tacky decadence of the post-modern, Lawson-boom era. A new generation of cool modernists was born. But what does this one herald?