Columbus, Indiana, is an unusual spot. Most towns within fifty miles of Indianapolis are internationally known for, well, nothing at all. This one is renowned for a superb collection of modernist buildings, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, I M Pei, Harry Weese, Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi and many more. Seven of these are US National Historic Landmarks.
There is, it seems, no end to our fascination with the palace of treasures that Sir John Soane left to the nation in his own memory. Sir Christopher Wren’s memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral famously proclaims Si monumentum requiris circumspice (‘If you seek his monument look around you’). By sealing his house and collections by […]
‘Rats cause riots!’ chanted demonstrators who forced their way into the House Galleries at the United States Congress in 1967. The American government was deliberating President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Rat Bill’, which would allocate $40 million to the elimination of rodent infestations in inner cities. Republican opponents of the bill had presented it as a trivial […]
There are, broadly, two methods of studying women in the past. The older, which is known simply as ‘women’s history’, first emerged alongside the feminist movement in the 1960s and developed academically in parallel with social history. It seeks to identify the contribution that women, individually and collectively, made to different historical eras and events. […]
For most of human history, from the ancient Semitic civilisations to the societies of the present, property has played a central role in exciting both achievement and destruction. In examining its role in our past and present lives, Rowan Moore’s new book offers many insights. Moore, architecture critic at The Observer, appreciates the role that […]
First published exactly seventy years ago, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 has never been out of print. Compact and clearly written, it somehow managed to encompass a lifetime’s learning in some thirty short but lucid chapters. In a review of 1954, the distinguished architectural writer J M Richards predicted, ‘It will certainly remain […]
In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing Gaudí’s Casa Milà, an apartment building in central Barcelona. ‘I was stunned,’ he writes in the introduction to Humanise. ‘I had no idea that buildings like this existed. I had no idea that such buildings could exist.’ The picture had a transformative effect on the young Heatherwick, who was already eyeing a career
‘That hovel? That’s what you’re planning to write a book about? Absolutely no one will read it! Besides, it’s not normal for a young woman to be so obsessed with death. You shouldn’t be making up books, you should see a psychiatrist.’ This damning assessment was delivered by Giulia, Charlotte Van den Broeck’s host during […]
Owen Hatherley blithely claims that this massive tour de force is ‘a guide to the place … you’re visiting, or a place you want to visit’. Pull the other one, squire. The notion of Owen Hatherley, Tripadvisor, is sheerly preposterous, though it may appeal to a tremulous publisher figuring out how to market this behemoth. He is really a polemicist, ready to take issue with anyone, including himself. His insistent invitations to look are heavy with allusions, catholic comparisons and quiet asides. The result of his tireless labour is an oblique, partial, lopsided survey of Britain throughout the long modernist century; and no matter what a platoon of celluloid collars and
In 1988, we – the Boyds – were looking to move to a bigger house in Fulham, where we were then living. But by haphazard miracle we ended up buying a house in the heart of Chelsea, between the King’s Road and the Thames, and have never moved. It’s impossible to imagine living anywhere else. Chelsea in 1988 was markedly different from Chelsea in 2022. For example, many of the houses
In December 1893 Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan in an earth house built by his father. The childhood home of Sir Walter Raleigh in Hayes Barton was made from cob, a mix of earth and straw. In 1825 the German lawyer Wilhelm Wimpf built one of the tallest rammed-earth buildings in the world in Weilburg, where it still stands, two centuries later. A vast earth-brick ziggurat
If you’re the sort of person who likes looking up at night, you might on occasion notice what appears to be an extremely bright star moving slowly across the sky. If it’s not a helicopter searchlight or a UFO then there’s a good chance it’s the International Space Station (ISS), a structure about as large […]
Brutalism is one of the few architectural style labels to have originally been used positively but subsequently become a term of abuse, in the process performing the opposite etymological journey to such terms as ‘gothic’ and ‘baroque’. ‘It is a concrete brutalist monstrosity’ is a blanket response that obscures the variety, beauty and complexity of […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm