Architecture news

• Robert Stern obituary

  19-12-2025 18:21
  US architect who designed 15 Central Park West, a successful homage to the grand apartment blocks of 1920s New YorkIt was Vanity Fair magazine that dubbed Robert Stern, who has died aged 86, “the king of Central Park West”, following the phenomenal success of his 2008 condominium at 15 Central Park West. Conceived as a homage to the grand and gracious Upper East Side apartment blocks so beloved of old money, it was a calculated retort to the anomie of New York’s modern glass to
  
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• The best design and architecture of 2025

  22-12-2025 13:00
  This year’s highlights include the remodelling of a Richard Seifert brutalist ‘corncob’ tower, a celebration of Japanese carpentry and a wearable hot-water bottle• The best art and photography of 2025
  • More on the best culture of 2025In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly s
  
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• ‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China

  17-12-2025 16:30
  Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
  The birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different storyIn 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”Beneath the headline Ugly Ar
  
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• ‘Lunch could last all day – and night’: inside Coco Chanel’s sun-kissed sanctum for art’s superstars

  15-12-2025 12:02
  The French fashion designer’s lavish Mediterranean villa was frequented by everyone from Dalí to Garbo to Stravinsky to Churchill. It has now been lovingly restored – with a thrillingly bolstered libraryIt is the place where Salvador Dalí painted The Enigma of Hitler, a haunting landscape featuring a giant telephone receiver that seems to be crying a tear over a cutout picture of the Fuhrer. Conceived in 1939, the work seems to anticipate war. It is also the place where
  
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• Trump says building DC triumphal arch is domestic policy chief’s ‘primary thing’

  14-12-2025 23:46
  Trump praises Vince Haley, his ex-speechwriter tasked with creating Arc de Triomphe knockoff amid affordability crisisAmid concerns that he has failed to address a worsening affordability crisis, with health insurance premiums about to spike dramatically for over 20 million Americans, Donald Trump revealed on Sunday that his domestic policy chief’s main priority is building a triumphal arch for Washington DC.Speaking at a White House holiday party, the president praised Vince Haley, his fo
  
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• Kevin McCloud: ‘We measure the value of a home by the number of toilets it has – which is bonkers’

  13-12-2025 20:00
  The Grand Designs presenter and co-host of Tim & Kev’s Big Design Adventure on living with bats, the most important room in a house and eating fermented sharkGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailThere’s an aphorism that Australians only want to talk about two things – sport and real estate. Do you think we talk too much about real estate?In my experience, Australians never talk about real estate but the Australian media talks about it all the time. It’s a little
  
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• Trump sued by preservation group over $300m White House ballroom project

  12-12-2025 21:22
  National Trust looks to halt construction, claiming Trump tore down historic East Wing without needed permissionDonald Trump is facing a federal lawsuit seeking to halt construction on his $300m White House ballroom, with historic preservationists accusing the president of violating multiple federal laws by tearing down part of the iconic building without required reviews or congressional approval.The legal challenge, filed on Friday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the US dist
  
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• The Barbican refurbishment should take heed of Leeds | Letter

  12-12-2025 18:58
  The University of Leeds complex was a prototype for the Barbican – and the work done to it over time demonstrates how brutalist buildings can be humanised, writes Alan RadfordI read with interest about the refurbishment plans for the Barbican (Barbican revamp to give ‘bewildering’ arts centre a new lease of life, 5 December). I spent more than 30 years working on the prototype – the large complex of buildings that the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon designed for the
  
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• ‘Like lipstick on a fabulous gorilla’: the Barbican’s many gaudy glow-ups and the one to top them all

  12-12-2025 15:49
  The brutalist arts-and-towers complex, where even great explorers get lost, is showing its age. Let’s hope the 50th anniversary upgrade is better than the ‘pointillist stippling’ tried in the 1990sThe Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London’s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architect
  
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• ‘Getting lost is good’: skybridge and floating stairs bring fun and thrills to mighty new Taiwan museum

  12-12-2025 14:16
  With its soaring ceilings, meandering pathways and mesh-like walls, Taichung Art Museum, designed by Sanaa, sweeps visitors from library to gallery to rooftop garden for rousing viewsWalking through the brand new Taichung Art Museum in central Taiwan, directions are kind of an abstract concept. Designed by powerhouse Japanese architecture firm Sanaa, the complex is a collection of eight askew buildings, melding an art museum and municipal library, encased in silver mesh-like walls, with soaring
  
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• David Rock obituary

  12-12-2025 12:44
  Architect who pioneered the idea of the collective workspace as a socially and economically supportive environment in London in the 1970sNow a familiar part of modern working life, the collective workspace, whereby small firms share office space and communal facilities, was the brainchild of the architect David Rock, who has died aged 96. He established a pioneering working community at 5 Dryden Street in Covent Garden in 1972, at a time when London’s famous fruit and vegetable market was
  
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• Trump is remodeling Washington to fit his twisted vision of America | Judith Levine

  09-12-2025 12:00
  The administration is offloading gems of US architecture while redesigning the city to match the president’s valuesWhile the original architect of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding ballroom steps down and preservationists panic over the fate of New Deal murals inside the Social Security Administration building, the president gushes about painting the granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, “fixing” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and erecting his own Arc de
  
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• The Right Rev Thomas McMahon obituary

  07-12-2025 17:02
  Roman Catholic bishop noted for opposing nuclear arms and abortion, and for remodelling Brentwood Cathedral in EssexCatholicism does not fall quite so neatly into conservative and liberal factions as is sometimes supposed. Thomas McMahon, the former RC bishop of Brentwood, who has died aged 89, was a case in point.So traditional in his liturgical tastes that he spent millions commissioning the architect Quinlan Terry to give his undistinguished cathedral in Essex a neoclassical makeover, McMahon
  
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• Bold shapes and binoculars: Frank Gehry’s stunning California architecture

  06-12-2025 20:00
  From his home town of Los Angeles, the architect designed a career around defying what was predictableIn Frank Gehry’s world, no building was left untilted, unexposed or untouched by unconventional material. The Canadian-American architect, who died in his Los Angeles home at 96, designed a career around defying what was predictable and pulling in materials that were uncommon and, as such, relatively inexpensive.Gehry collaborated with artists to turn giant binoculars into an entryway of a
  
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• Frank Gehry: maximalist master who created instant icons like the Bilbao Guggenheim

  06-12-2025 15:01
  He made buildings that looked like slouching drunks and quarrelling couples but it was the Spanish museum that secured his ‘starchitect’ status – a creation that became something of a curseFrank Gehry once had a cameo in The Simpsons in which he designed buildings by scrunching up pieces of paper. There was a bit more to it than that, but from Prague to Panama City, his scrunched contours were instantly recognisable, expressed in an exuberant parade of buildings that cranked an
  
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• Six greats reads: a train ride to the future; searching for the ‘sky boys’ and wallaby hunting in the English countryside

  06-12-2025 07:00
  Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days Continue reading...
  
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• Frank Gehry obituary

  06-12-2025 01:13
  Canadian–American architect who explored crumpling and fish curves in such buildings as the Guggenheim Museum in BilbaoFrank Gehry, who has died aged 96 after a respiratory illness, influenced the course of world architecture at least twice. First, in the 1970s, with his informal ad hoc aesthetic, he showed how such material as chain-link fencing could be turned into an expressive art form. Secondly, in the 1990s, he showed how the computer could be used to help realise extraordinarily com
  
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• From Bilbao to Las Vegas: Frank Gehry’s incredible architecture – in pictures

  05-12-2025 21:47
  The award-winning designer and architect leaves behind unique buildings all across the world from Dundee to Düsseldorf. He died after a brief respiratory illness at the age of 96Frank Gehry, legendary Canadian-American architect, dies aged 96 Continue reading...
  
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• Frank Gehry, legendary Canadian-American architect, dies aged 96

  05-12-2025 21:38
  The architect, whose work included the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, died after a brief illnessFrom Bilbao to Las Vegas: Frank Gehry’s incredible architecture – in picturesFrank Gehry, one of the most influential and distinctive talents in American architecture, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles following a brief respiratory illness, his chief of staff confirmed. He was 96.Gehry, the most recognizable American architect since Frank Lloyd
  
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• Gillian Hopwood obituary

  05-12-2025 17:42
  Architect who with her husband, John Godwin, designed more than 1,000 modernist buildings in post-independence NigeriaThe architect Gillian Hopwood, who has died aged 98, only recently found recognition in her home country, England, after a career spent since 1954 in Nigeria. As Godwin and Hopwood, she and her husband, John Godwin, worked together as equals in a partnership that long outlasted the larger London-based practices that briefly flourished there in the years leading up to independence
  
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• ‘They rose out of the ground!’: Scotland’s brutalist beauties – in pictures

  04-12-2025 08:00
  The imposing concrete buildings that defined British postwar architecture held a vision of the future – but many fell into disrepair. A new book finds the finest examples Continue reading...
  
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• Country Diary: A lonely chapel that whispers and roars | Sara Hudston

  04-12-2025 06:30
  Abbotsbury, Dorset: Long ago this was the place to come and wish for a husband. It is empty today, but still so full of presenceTwo ascending buzzards dazzle against the sun as I climb to St Catherine’s Chapel alone on its hill above the sea. It is the saint’s own feast day (25 November), when women once came to recite a charm for getting married. The traditional wording was blunt: “A husband, St Catherine, a handsome one, St Catherine, a rich one, St Catherine,
  
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• An eco obscenity: Norman Foster’s steroidal new skyscraper is an affront to the New York skyline

  03-12-2025 09:00
  It contains enough steel to go round the world twice – and even has a fake breeze to flutter the stars-and-stripes flag in its lobby. If this $4bn colossus is just the first of a new breed of bulky supertalls, is Britain next?Among the slender needles and elegant spires of the Manhattan skyline, a mountainous lump has reared into view. It galumphs its way up above the others, climbing in bulky steps with the look of several towers strapped together, forming a dark, looming mass. From some
  
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• ‘It would take 11 seconds to hit the ground’: the roughneck daredevils who built the Empire State Building

  01-12-2025 15:00
  They wrestled steel beams, hung off giant hooks and tossed red hot rivets – all while ‘strolling on the thin edge of nothingness’. Now the 3,000 unsung heroes who raised the famous skyscraper are finally being celebratedPoised on a steel cable a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, a weather-beaten man in work dungarees reaches up to tighten a bolt. Below, though you hardly dare to look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling cityscape of New York and the US itself, rolling ou
  
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• Older couples need a living room of one’s own | Brief letters

  30-11-2025 19:10
  Separate rooms | Downsizing homes | Nigel Farage | Hong Kong fires |Idle Working Men’s ClubIt’s not just renters who need a living room (The death of the living room: ‘It’s hard to invite people over – not everyone wants to sit on a bed’, 26 November). What about a couple of senior citizens, home most of the time, who do not wish to spend every waking hour in the same room? In our local area there appear to be no flats for sale with a kitchen/diner and se
  
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• Our beautiful multiplex: Milton Keynes council fights to save landmark cinema The Point

  30-11-2025 13:00
  The building was once home to the UK’s first US-style multiplex. Now developers are seeking to demolish it for a new housing schemeForty years ago this month, British cinema-going changed for ever with the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes, the UK’s first US-style multiplex. Looming over Midsummer Boulevard, the Point’s mirrored glass ziggurat and red pyramidal frame audaciously synthesised Maya and Egyptian motifs in a futuristic, hi-tech temple of pleasure. As well as 10
  
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• Robert AM Stern, architect dubbed ‘King of Central Park West’, dies aged 86

  27-11-2025 21:35
  Stern, credited with designing 15 Central Park West, sought to design buildings that invoked pre-war splendorRobert AM Stern, an architect who fashioned the New York City skyline with buildings that sought to invoke pre-war splendor but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.Dubbed “The King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern was credited with designing 15 Central Park West that, in 2008, was credited as being the highest-priced ne
  
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• Courtauld to embark on £82m campus project at Somerset House in London

  27-11-2025 12:00
  ‘Once-in-a-generation transformation’ of Grade-I building will bring teaching spaces under same roof as galleryThe Courtauld has unveiled an £82m campus redevelopment it is calling a “once-in-a-generation transformation” of its Grade-I listed building, Somerset House, in London.The Stirling prize-winning architects Witherford Watson Mann will take charge of the four-year project at the teaching and research centre and public gallery, which follows their 2021 revamp
  
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• Two Australian homes win top places in international 2025 Dezeen awards

  27-11-2025 03:10
  A Dracula-inspired bathroom in Sydney and an outside-inside home in Melbourne claim interior design and architecture prizesGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailPoint Piper in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is home to one of the best bathrooms in the world, according to the annual Dezeen awards, a global design accolade.Its dark, moody and luxurious interiors were partly inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Continue reading...
  
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• The death of the living room: ‘It’s hard to invite people over – not everyone wants to sit on a bed’

  26-11-2025 11:00
  The number of rental properties without a lounge is surging, and people are having to eat and socialise in kitchens, bedrooms and stairwells. How can you relax and build community without a communal area?‘Without a living room, your world becomes quite small,” says Georgie, a 27-year-old climbing and outdoor instructor. When she moved into a house-share with four strangers in 2023, she wasn’t worried about the lack of a living room. “I kind of thought it would be fine &nd
  
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