Each month we highlight a building of our period, at home or abroad, that we think deserves attention.
by August Myrseth The UOP Fragrance Factory was designed in 1969 by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano as a purpose-built perfume laboratory and manufacturing site for Universal Oil Products. It was completed in 1973, and production began at the site in...
By Tess Pinto The intellectual HQ of fish fingers, Walton Court in Walton on Thames, Surrey, is under serious threat from a current application for total demolition. Designed by the highly influential and long standing British practice Sir John Bur...
by Susannah Charlton Colston Hall was one of the Festival of Britain concert halls, along with those on the South Bank, in Coventry and Manchester. It was part of Bristol’s contribution to the Festival and of the regeneration of Bristol after the ...
By Wendy Akers The fog which had shrouded San Francisco for days gradually started to lift as we climbed Cathedral Hill, making the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption ahead of us appear to almost float above the city. Taking inspiration from th...
by Victor Smith The Scottish architect James Robb Scott, (1882 - 1965) designed a string of railways stations - from Bishopstone to Bromley North, Horsham to Hastings, Ramsgate to Richmond - but his Art Deco masterpiece was Surbiton Station, in the ...
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...
Look for past Buildings of the Month by entering the name of an individual building or architect or browsing the drop down list.