back up test

For what is au courant in the world of architectural ideas, you can visit the degree and diploma shows, and for a view of what journalists find interesting, you can read the journals; but you can't beat a bit of lunchtime  flânerie    for spotting trends in what is actually getting built.   The Gutter and the Stars pounds the pavements of London en route between meetings to bring you the latest that is emerging from the hoardings (and indeed the hoardings themselves ). I was a bit disappointed to see the Hog in the Pound pub at the top of South Molton Street demolished -  like the now vanished Swiss Centre, an interesting and rather characterful piece of 1960s architecture of the kind that Westminster City Council seem only too happy to see replaced.  But the new building by DSDHA is, I think, a worthy replacement, clad in luscious glazed terracotta and making the most of its quirky 'prow' site. Apart from the increasingly fashionable (and entirely we...

Rebuilding Gotham City's Wayne Central Station, commissioned by the Caped Crusader's dad but now crumbling, was never going to be straightforward, what with crooked union bosses, a femme fatale conservationist set on putting a stop to the demolition, and the disillusioned son of the original architect who is not all he seems - not to mention Kem Roomhaus, a Dutch celebrity architect 'frightened of his own genius'. Oddly overlooked by the book review pages of the architectural press, this recent graphic novel from DC Comics is a lot of fun.  It is dedicated to Hugh Ferriss , and the look of a lovingly realised Gotham is very much that of 1930s New York - an obvious but successful choice - it's much less easy to imagine Batman swooping around in, for example,  the glassy, 1960s fantasy architecture of Tati's  Play Time.     And if you are to stand a chance of making a story involving architects into a page-turner, best not to set it in a multi-disciplinary co...

No horror vacui here in New Bond Street, where beautifully made flat white sheeting covers a large scaffold in a single taut piece, interrupted only by a neat vertical slot for hoists on each floor - a refreshing, palate-cleansing change from the banality of those 'instant pastiche' scaffolds that offer you a picture of the building behind.  If only all new buildings had as much care and thought put into them....I hope the thinking included consideration of wind load in a gale, though.

The architecture of some types of building has become more and more about skin, and less and less about substance.  A rash of recent new buildings in the City of Westminster demonstrates an interest in patterned surface treatments to the elevations. On this new office building in Buckingham Gate in Victoria (above), sandstone cladding is decorated with swirling patterns of (3D) gouge marks, its inspiration appearing to be somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. On a weird new building in Oxford Street that is nearing completion (south side, near Marble Arch)  the glass and metal panel cladding system includes decorated panels that seem to have a similar aesthetic intention, this time in 2D only, and heading more towards the world of geometry. And next to Edgware Road tube station, possibly the apotheosis of this trend, at least in Westminster - this time more purely geometric -  a cut and paste update of random pages of Owen Jones' 'Grammar of Ornamen...