Each month we highlight a building of our period, at home or abroad, that we think deserves attention.
by Alan Powers What a site for a building! Durham Cathedral rides on its rocky promontory above the wooded gorge of the River Wear in a manner that is pure picturesque, as John Sell Cotman’s watercolours show us. How could a modern building match ...
by Israel Nagore Odhams Walk in Covent Garden, built in 1979 by the Greater London Council (GLC), was ahead of its time. Its complex geometry - stepped flats organized around common courtyards, elevated galleries, and private terraces - generates a...
by Neil Jackson The city of Izumo (population 146,000) is in Shimane Prefecture, a still remote and under-populated area located on the north coast of Honshū, the main Japanese island, facing the Sea of Japan. The Chūgoku mountains to the south sq...
Visiting the newly restored Villa Cavrois (1929-32, restored 2008-15) in Lille’s leafy northern suburb of Croix, I was taken aback, even on a gloomy, grey April day by the sheer, almost industrial, scale and exuberance of the building: a family ho...
by Eva Palacios The embassy of Czechoslovakia (1965-1970) was planned as a statement of the country’s new communist society, in the new style adopted by Czech architects: Brutalism. In the mid twentieth century the grandiose Italianate mansions on...
by David Quoroll Sayers Croft is a remarkable place. Nearly a million young people have passed the Weeping Beech tree and down its welcoming drive, many of them enjoying their first real experience of the countryside, and a taste of freedom from the...
by Andy Davies In February 1969 a momentous debate within the University of London about the redevelopment of a Georgian square in their Bloomsbury home marked the end of the free hand of authorities to plan cities in the Modernist tradition. The sc...
by Siri Hoem Erling Viksjø’s government buildings in Oslo, The Highrise (1958) and The Y-block (1969), constitute a unique architectural whole, and are key works of Norwegian modernist architecture. Both are decorated with integral art made by P...
by Alison Sinclair Terry’s of York originated in 1767 in the sugar confectionery business of Bayldon and Berry which by 1824 occupied premises in the fashionable centre of York close to the Mansion House in St Helen’s Square and just round the c...
by Owen Hopkins One of the key moments in my recent book on the architecture and ‘afterlife’ of the great English Baroque architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1662–1736), comes towards the end, when the story reaches the 1950s and 1960s. These decad...
Look for past Buildings of the Month by entering the name of an individual building or architect or browsing the drop down list.