Architecture news

• Historic British seaside hotels are glorious white elephants, but perhaps they can have new lives | Rowan Moore

  27-07-2024 19:20
  
  Giant structures in an array of far-fetched architectural styles rose with coming of railways and declined with popularity of air travel• Faded no more: the return of British seaside resorts’ grand hotelsAt their peak, in the second half of the 19th century, British seaside hotels were Vegas-like in their brash pursuit of profit. They were big stacks of accommodation, packing as much bedroom space as they could behind their cliff-like facades, none-too-sensitive to their prominent loc
  
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• Faded no more: the return of British seaside resorts’ grand hotels

  27-07-2024 19:20
  
  Many coastal towns are seeing a post-pandemic resurgence, with new builds and stately piles being returned to their former grandeur• Rowan Moore: Historic British seaside hotels are glorious white elephants, but perhaps they can have new livesThe Grand is a dog-eared Cluedo board of a hotel. The art deco ballroom, its sprung dancefloor covered by carpet, opens into a library used for community events, which in turn leads to an enormous dining room, while the other wing has a billiards room.
  
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• Up on the roof: the homespun art of rural Punjab – in pictures

  27-07-2024 18:00
  
  When Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora travelled to Punjab state in 2014, he was struck by the enormous cartoonish sculptures that adorned rooftops across the region’s rural villages. Known as “showpieces”, the artworks double as water tanks and are part of a custom beginning in the 1970s, wherein Punjabi citizens who had immigrated to other parts of the world erected them on top of the homes they’d kept in their native country as a symbol of prosperity. “I was
  
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