Underneath the arches
The Elephant and Castle shopping centre is more of an oddity than an eyesore. It lies like a stricken container ship opposite the dignified columns of the Metropolitan Tabernacle and the sweep of...
View ArticleHouse rules
Britain needs more houses, and the government’s highly unpopular draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) at least asks how to get them — the right question even if it gives the wrong answer....
View ArticleRoom with a view
Living Architecture is a new social enterprise that adds a touch of glamour to the traditional British holiday. Instead of a cute cottage, cramped caravan or crumbling castle, Living Architecture...
View ArticleNew build
The Bauhaus was a sort of university of design, whose progressive ideas eventually fell foul of the Nazis. But as the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is keen to impress, it was also a lifestyle, a...
View ArticleScience fiction as reality
What’s that in your pocket? Magic or art? The near ubiquitous iPhone may be rammed with very new technology, but it is a witness of very old, even mysterious, values. Few of us understand its inner...
View ArticleA step away from buying toothpaste
Fifty years ago it was not possible to bid at auction via the telephone — that first historic telephone bid was made for a Monet at Christie’s in 1967. Now the auction house’s Great Rooms, and indeed...
View ArticleThe Dagenham Dustbin
For those of us who find passion in national iconography, this is a melancholy historical moment. It’s a very bad time for British manufacturing and an even worse one for British symbols. The...
View ArticleIn the worst possible taste
What are the rules of taste at Christmas? How might the fastidious chart a neat path through this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption? How might dignity be maintained in this...
View ArticleMauvais goût
It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a...
View ArticleNot the who but the how
Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white...
View ArticleDream machine
In 1951, Arthur Drexler, an influential curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organised an exhibition called 8 Automobiles. Drexler, who used to wear a bow tie, was one of the people who helped...
View ArticleCreate your own culture
Technology is turning the human urge to consume information into an unhealthy addiction. Some of this consumption — reading, following the news, exposing ourselves to culture — has obvious merits; I’d...
View ArticleBuilding a future
One of the big differences between Frank Lloyd Wright and me is that, when he was nine, his mother gave him a set of wooden building bricks. When I was the same age, I wanted Lego for Christmas, but my...
View ArticleUnderneath the arches
The Elephant and Castle shopping centre is more of an oddity than an eyesore. It lies like a stricken container ship opposite the dignified columns of the Metropolitan Tabernacle and the sweep of...
View ArticleHouse rules
Britain needs more houses, and the government’s highly unpopular draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) at least asks how to get them — the right question even if it gives the wrong answer....
View ArticleRoom with a view
Living Architecture is a new social enterprise that adds a touch of glamour to the traditional British holiday. Instead of a cute cottage, cramped caravan or crumbling castle, Living Architecture...
View ArticleUnintelligent design
Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the...
View ArticleUn-Beaton
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was effete, pink-and-white pretty, theatrical and mother-adored, with a stodgy brother...
View ArticleThe rise and fall of Sony
Here is a Japanese fairy tale for Christmas. An allegory of insight, opportunism and a fall from favour. It is 1945. Japan is devastated and disgraced, but two bright young men, Akio Morita and Masaru...
View ArticleMauvais goût
It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating…
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