by Christian Schwägerl | Features
anthropogenic: when environment becomes invironment Most of us may be obsessed with Brexit or Trump at the moment, but it hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that the world is burning with an intensity that scientists concur is part of a man-made pattern. Christian...
by Timothy Hyman | Books, Features
THE WORLD NEW MADE Figurative Painting in the 20th Century Figurative painting – we are all too often told – is dead. This was certainly the narrative of the modernist orthodoxy throughout the 20th century. Now anxious to dominate the current narrative,...
by Robert Harbison | Books, Features
RUINS and FRAGMENTS Tales of Loss and Rediscovery At least since the 18th century, many of us have found ruins and fragments to be tantalisingly alluring. We have celebrated their aesthetic appeal in paintings by Robert Des Ruines and in architectural follies. But...
by Robert Bevan | Books, Features
The Destruction of Memory – Architecture at War It is because we – in the West – have a highly developed concept of ‘global heritage’, that the systematic destruction of architectural totems at Palmyra and Nimrud by Islamic State, is able...
by Paul Dobraszczyk | Features
Into the Zone: the Ruins of Chernobyl Ever since the Renaissance we have discovered and developed a somewhat morbid pleasure in architectural ruins. The relicts of former civilisations are memento mori on the grandest of scales – deeply evocative and salutary...
by Raci | Features
Can Culture Save Us? The European Crisis of Confidence Can the tastes and activities of powerful tastemakers of the 17th and 18th centuries tell us anything about how we got to where we are today, with Europe in crisis and possibly at breaking point, and more...
by Paul Dobraszczyk | Features
Rage against the machine: <br/>Victorian cast iron and its critics In today’s world the previously fluid and protean notion of ‘taste’ appears to have almost vaporised. The problem is that ‘taste’ has been deconstructed out of any...
by Christian Schwägerl | Features
Anthropocene: the Age of Man It was in a light bulb moment in 2000 that Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen convincingly argued that we are now living in a new geological epoch, by demonstrating the extraordinary dominance of mankind over Earth’s biological,...
by Barbara Penner | Books, Features
A Story of Both Grand and Mean Feats Enter the smallest room of the house and you are in a private space where there is no provision for anyone other than you. It may be the only room in the house where you will ever be truly alone. Yet reach for the flush and you...
by Raci | Books, Features
Marble Mania Antiques and Collectables for the Latter Day Roman Empire If whilst wandering around the statue lined halls of many an English country house, you may have developed the impression that they were built around their priceless antiques and collectables, then...
by Raci | Books, Features
I always feel a sense of deep disappointment when I think of Art Deco. It happens whenever I drive by the Express building on Fleet Street or when The Great Gatsby comes up, or another book like Jared Goss’s French Art Deco is published. It’s as if there...
by Raci | Features, Interiors
We Need To Go Deeper One of today’s most popular and rapidly growing interior and product styles is the ‘natural home’. Ironically for such a modest and unshowy design style, it is richly represented in endless publications, and interiors magazines...
by Raci | Features
Can something good emerge from something bad? That’s the question I asked myself two summers ago at a garden party at Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire – now the Wellingborough Golf Club – my addled thoughts darting between the fascinating story I...
by Raci | Features
Can the way you design or decorate your home be life changing? Can interior design make you a happier, healthier, more productive person? As an interior designer I would say that the answer is… a qualified yes. I mean it can’t perform miracles like fix...
by Raci | Features
These Days it’s All About Rubbish. There’s Recycling, Downcycling, Precycling and the Buzzword of the Moment, ‘Upcycling’. If it hasn’t quite entered your consciousness just yet, then it will do soon – and in a very big way. Simply...
