History
THE CLASSICAL IDEALS OF LE CORBUSIER
How three weeks in Athens left a lasting impression on the father of Modernism
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain – Joseph Rykwert
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain, the AR invites Joseph Rykwert to reconsider its role in shaping modern, post-war architecture
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain – Alan Powers
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain, the AR invites Alan Powers, to reconsider its role in shaping modern, post-war architecture
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain – Mary Banham
Mary Banham was 27 when she attended the Festival of Britain. She visited the South Bank Exhibition in 1951 with her late husband, Peter Reyner Banham, who as an editor on the AR went on to write a number of critical essays on the Festival and the significance it held for post-war British modernism. 25 years later, Mary Banham co-curated the V&A’s exhibition, A Tonic to the Nation
Sixty years on from the Festival of Britain – Trevor Dannatt
Trevor Dannatt was 28 years old when he joined the Festival Hall Design Team, headed by Leslie Martin, but working under the associate architect Peter Moro, who held special responsibility for the interiors. Sneaking off from time to time to oversee the construction of a small tea bar, he got to know the South Bank site very well, both during the Festival of Britain and afterward, and to this day turns a keen eye to the future of this popular London site. Here he recalls his 1951 experience ...
Essays
Typology Quarterly: Hospitals
Ancient civilisation advocated letting the wider world’s healing power flow through the body and mind, but the industrialisation of healthcare isolated patients from these larger contexts. From city centres to sylvan settings, today’s hospitals must reintegrate the public realm into the healing process
Living Bits and Bricks
From brick to rare earth metal, the elements of our architecture - though remaining geological in origin - have evolved to the point of bursting into life, rather than merely mimicking biological form. This presages a brave new feedback-fuelled world where we don’t just inhabit our architecture but integrate with it
The Big Rethink: Integral Theory
In the third installment of the AR’s campaign, Peter Buchanan introduces Integral theory, which establishes a new framework for the design of 21st-century buildings and cities
Typology Quarterly: Schools
In the industrial era, schools developed as highly controlled environments to instil the discipline to thrive in a machine age. Now, to prepare pupils for success in a knowledge economy, the evolving typology is more fluidly conceived to provide flexibility, connectivity, and spaces for social and educational encounters
10 Years On: Evaluating kroll’s eco school
Ten years ago, the AR published a new secondary school at Caudry in northern France by Lucien Kroll, which marked an important advance in green building. The result of an architect/contractor competition, the school had to meet a demanding list of ecological criteria. As reported in January 2002 these were met and the school got off to a good start. But how has its life developed?
Day care center in Chimundo, Mosambique
Nineteen students, five weeks in Mozambique, one school - built in twelve days
AR History
AR History
The Architectural Review was founded in 1896, on the cusp of the 20th century. The cover of the first issue bore the legend ‘a magazine for the artist and craftsman’, though this subsequently became ‘artist, archaeologist, designer and craftsman’, thus firmly setting its sights on Victorian polymaths everywhere
AR Archive
1961 May: Psychiatric Institute Milan by Vittorio Vigano
A functionalist approach to a challenging brief is resolved in this unintentionally Brutalist hospital
2002 January: Library And Archive, London by Wright & Wright Architects
On the site of a Victorian public baths, a new library and archive illuminates women’s lives and is a model of good practice in en,ironmental regulation
1990 April: Platform Houses in Katsuura, Japan by Kazuyo Sejima
Houses as neutral enclosures for transitory human activities, this is what Kazuyo Sejima wanted to create in her platform houses: but their reality is a great deal more imbued with presence
1994 February: Henri Ciriani's Antiquities Musem, Arles, France
Henri Ciriani’s new antiquities museum at Arles in southern France boldly reinterprets and extends the spatial disciplines of the Corbusian Modernist inheritance in a sensually stunning interaction of light, form and colour
1989 January: Retreats of Fashion
In the fickle world of fashion retailing, the interior is merely a marketing tool, however noble the aspirations of the designer. Seasonal changes have sparked a startling change of style in the Katharine Hamnett stores. Adrian Dannatt compares the contrasting architectural responses to new demands in three of her shops; one by Foster and two by Nigel Coates
1961 APRIL: AMANCIO GUEDES "ARCHITECT OF LOURENÇO MARQUES"
For the past ten years a Lisbon-born architect, Amancio d’Alpoim Guedes, has been practising in Lourenço Marques, the capital of Mozambique, producing work both original and idiosyncratic to which no attention has been given by the outside world.
1977 May: The Pompidou Centre, The "Pompodolium"
Reyner Banham discussed the roles of Megastructure, Archigram and modern technology in Pompidou’s design
1972 December - Cars Cathedral
How not to do it? National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, Hampshire by Leonard Manasseh and Partners
1971 August: House at Prestwood, Buckinghamshire
House designed by Peter Aldington on a simple structural and spatial proposition
1977 July: The Museum of London by Powell and Moya
All Glorious Within – Michael Brawne’s critism of Powell and Moya’s museum for London
