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Nolli's great 1748 map of Rome - turbocharged version here - is a magnificent and continuing source of inspiration for architects and urbanists.  It is famous for going further than typical city maps of the period (such as Rocque's map of London, also from the 1740s) - and of today - to include plans of public buildings as well as streets and squares.  It thus shows the layout of nearly everything that can be termed the public realm, inside or outside - but not that which is private. Two and half centuries later, Google's Street View is catching up. Lazy or overstretched architects have got used to the idea that they can get away without visiting the site by using the street views that are available now of nearly everywhere.  But one can now visit the insides of some buildings as well - at Lincoln, for example, you can enter the close and go in through the great west door of that city's glorious cathedral to see the interiors of the nave, transepts and ambulatory (bu...

To Hopkins Architects' Wellcome Trust building in Euston Road for the launch of the latest book of their work, Hopkins 3.  Their Wellcome client introduced the evening with unreserved praise for a building now nearly ten years old that still looks as as good as new (partly due, I learn later, to Wellcome's luck or wisdom in retaining long serving staff who look after and run the building as it was meant to be looked after and run - something that is not as common as it should be). The quality, consistency and rigour of the architecture in the book, from the Wellcome building to the Olympic Velodrome - taking in along the way a surprisingly diverse range, including small country house interventions and cricket stands in India along with the better known known projects - is entirely unmatched by any other UK practice over that period.  Of course Hopkins have been fortunate in the quality of their list of major institutional clients with an interest in building properly...

Reflections on return from MIPIM, the annual European property fest in Cannes. Like so much that happens in the world of property, there is plenty that is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland... The event takes place in 'the bunker', a giant, generic exhibition space which in spite of being on the shores of the Mediterranean, might as well be the NEC or Excel once you are inside it. Architects spend their time trying to attract the attention of developers, who are looking the other way because they are trying to attract the attention of investors, who may be more interested in countries that encourage you to build things rather than giving you a hard time.... Several thousand delegates from the UK attend, and tens of thousands from the EU, Eastern Europe and elsewhere - but one suspects the interactions between Brits and continentals are pretty limited.  Most of the UK action is in the 'London stand', actually a standoffish tent separate from the bunker. The London stand ...

The London Plan tells us to optimise the use of land, and residential densities.  It also tells us to conserve and make use of 'heritage assets'. This project in Banner Street (EC1) is a built case study of what happens when you try do both at once. All very polite and neutral, to 'respect the character' of the old facade.  (Depending on who did it, the architects may well have used the word 'palimpsest', inaccurately, in making the case for it.) In Moscow, in new building projects as in other respects, they are a bit more gung ho: Not exactly refined, but entirely in the spirit of modern Russia. More homes are needed in London, and one way of providing them is to build on top of existing buildings a lot more than we do.  As the above examples show, this doesn't need to be limited to the cautious set-back single extra floor, justified on the grounds that 'you'll never notice it'. In Shoreditch, the Hackney planners are to be congratulated on bein...

Wilkinson Eyre's Crystal sustainability centre in the Royal Docks is worth a visit (or actually I would say **  vaut le détour  rather than *** vaut le voyage ) - especially while you can still get there by the Emirates Air Line cable car over the Thames, also well worth doing in its own right, and worth doing soon before they take it down and relocate it to an Alp - since user numbers are plummeting, and it seems to be used only by tourists. This example of the Architecture of Funny Shapes does however share a difficulty that occurs in many more straight-down-the-line modernist projects - that of making it clear where the front door is.  The newsagent-style sandwich board seen in the photo above, not I think designed by Wilkinson Eyre or included in the original specifications, reads 'Welcome' - a polite way of saying 'Entrance this way'. You don't have this kind of difficulty spotting the front door at the National Gallery.  On the other hand, if you're p...

The quality of architecture is usually all of a piece - the awful-looking bog standard homes available everywhere are usually badly planned as well. A  review by Rowan Moore in yesterday's Observer featured new houses at Harlow by Alison Brooks, which looked interesting and sounded as if they had had more thought put into them than most.  Referring to planning minister Nick Boles' stated wish to improve on the 'pig ugly' housing that homebuyers are normally offered, the review points out that well-designed housing like this is mainly about providing practical, liveable homes, and that architects as much as anyone else prefer to avoid discussions of difficult words like 'beauty' - 'some will find these houses beautiful, some not... but looks are not the main point.' The point, surely, is that while the offerings of many volume housebuilders are indeed pig ugly, good projects such as this one at Harlow, by skilled, prizewinning architects, tend to look int...

This flyer seen on a recent trip Brussels appears to be a protest about some planned new buildings.  Presumably the buildings won’t actually be bright red, though.   The ‘protest montage’ is a now familiar ploy of those who oppose projects. Every effort is made to make schemes look as daft and offensive as possible (equal and opposite, of course, to the efforts of the promoters, which can be equally misleading).  The technique was used in London by opponents of the alleged ‘steel and glass tower blocks’ that Richard Rogers planned for the Chelsea Barracks site (for which read: ten storey buildings much the same height as nearby 1930s mansion blocks, with big windows made of that futuristic material ‘glass’ because even rich people deserve daylight).  I don’t know who started all this, but the architect planner Thomas Sharp was certainly at it in his 1968 book Town and Townscape .   These intriguing images of an abandoned scheme for university buildings in t...