Each month we highlight a building of our period, at home or abroad, that we think deserves attention.
Mervyn Seal, 1976 These delightful and unique holiday homes were designed by the Torbay architect Mervyn Seal (1930-) in 1976 for Sladnor Park, a holiday camp at Maidencombe, just north of Torquay. Seal’s early housing in the area was well-known l...
Maguire & Murray, 1962-7 Millions of rail passengers travel through Crewe. Those who leave the station will find a railway town of nineteenth century redbrick terraced and semi-detached houses. Yet, about two kilometres away from the station, is...
Feliksas Vizbaras (1931-2) “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” - this famous phrase by Sir Winston Churchill could be applied to one of the unique stories of the 20th century, which comes from Lithuania in Northern Europe. It is...
Peter Smithson (2001-8) It is not well-enough known that Peter Smithson designed a museum, and that it was actually built. Perhaps that is because it’s in a sleepy suburb of a sleepy German town. Or perhaps because it was designed so late in his c...
by Tim Benton In 1926 Eileen Gray bought a plot on the Côte d’Azur, squeezed between a railway line and the rocky coastline with a beautiful view over the Bay of Monaco. Here she designed and built, with the help of her lover Jean Badovici, a vil...
Boston City Hall, Massachusetts, USA Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles (with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty), 1962–1969 by Mark Pasnik As the keystone of Boston’s ambitious sixty-acre Government Center project, Boston City Hall represents an im...
by Kenneth Powell This year marks the 70th birthday of the Aldeburgh Festival, founded in 1948 by Benjamin Britten, then a relatively low-key regional event, now a major feature of the international musical calendar. The principal base of the Fest...
by David Knight The Church of Santo António da Polana, inaugurated in 1962 to the designs of Nuno Craveiro Lopes, is an extraordinary formal gesture in its context – a 20th century suburb of Maputo, Mozambique – but it also represents an extrao...
March 2018 by Alistair Fair Sixty years ago, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan saw the completion of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, as the beginning of a new era. ‘Enter most theatres and you enter the gilded, cupidaceous past’, he wrote. ‘En...
February 2018 by T J Zupančič “Construction of the International Automatic Telephone Exchange, nicknamed The Piano, was quite a big technological challenge in the 1970s,” explained a sprightly, forthright Milan Mihelič, then 85, in a charmin...
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