Architecture news

• Queen City: remembering the black neighbourhood erased for the Pentagon

  21-06-2023 17:12
  
  A new monument has been crafted in Virginia to commemorate the historically black neighbourhood destroyed in 1941 for the construction of the PentagonWilliam Vollin remembers the games he played as a boy. “Hide and go seek and marbles and ball games and that kind of thing,” he says in a video call. “I never thought I was poor personally because I had a grandmother who worked 30 years or so as a maid and always kept food on the table. We adjusted to the environment.”Now 92
  
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• The new National Portrait Gallery review – ‘It’s the same old cocktail party’

  21-06-2023 01:01
  
  National Portrait Gallery, LondonWe’re told it has been changed utterly. As if. The NPG makes a claim to be a serious temple of art – but its dismal subservience to celebrity persistsThe National Portrait Gallery in London has been closed for three years. I wish I could say that I’ve missed it. This is a museum with barely any great art in it, a peculiarly British institution that reflects our national cult of celebrity. Since 1856 it has amassed pictures of the great and good,
  
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• Slashed stone, daylight galore and doors by Tracey Emin: the National Portrait Gallery’s £41m rebirth

  21-06-2023 01:01
  
  Forty-five faces of women, scribbled by Emin, now beam out from bronze doors – all part of an astonishing revamp that has turned this once unloved London landmark into a great buildingThe National Portrait Gallery in London has always felt like the poor cousin of the National Gallery, an afterthought tucked around the back of the star attraction. It stands as an awkward rear extension, squeezed into an unloved armpit where the sticky chaos of Leicester Square spills into Charing Cross Road
  
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