Relocation of the Wayfarers Chapel on the Pacific coast shows the vulnerability of cultural sites in an increasingly volatile climate
For 73 years it reigned, unique and serene, on a high plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean: the Wayfarers Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s midcentury reinvention of what a church could be.
The photogenic, see-through sanctuary framed in a canopy of redwoods was beloved long before it became Instagram-famous. Jayne Mansfield was married there, Brian Wilson too. Last Christmas Eve, two weeks after the chapel had been designated a National Historic Landmark, it took three services to accommodate everyone who showed up to spend the holiday with chapel regulars. No one knew it would be the last one.
The proposed 1 Undershaft skyscraper is meant to help woo workers, but it’ll make the Square Mile worse for everyone
St Helen’s Square is a nice spot in the City of London, sometimes thronged with lunching office workers, at other times a good place to pause and catch your breath. It captures more sunshine than you’d expect, given the towers around. It is surrounded by beautiful architecture that tells the rich history of the Square Mile: medieval churches, Richard Rogers’ epic Lloyd’s building, the Gherkin a little further off.
It helps to make the City what it is: a rich and sociable place drawing people away from their work-at-home desks. Yet its rulers, the City of London Corporation, seem set to obliterate it. They are due to consider a planning application for 1 Undershaft, a tower that would extend over 29% of the square, while overshadowing much of the rest with a projecting tongue-shaped platform overhead. The corporation is showing every sign of supporting the scheme.
From Churchill’s old War Office to Liverpool’s Municipal Buildings, the government and cash-starved local authorities have been selling off valuable assets to plug budget shortfalls. But should pieces of the nation’s soul ever be put up for sale?
Outside the Box is a cafe in the scenic spa town of Ilkley, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales; a good-natured, relaxing place where you can enjoy a reasonably priced enchilada at the tables that spill out on to the pavement. It’s a social enterprise, dedicated to giving skills and confidence to the people with Down’s syndrome and other learning disabilities who enthusiastically staff it, so as to “release their full potential” and help them lead “more independent and fulfilled lives”. It occupies the Arcade, a glass-roofed, stone-fronted, iron-balustraded Victorian structure that had fallen into disuse until the cafe and its associated administrative rooms moved there in 2019. The building belongs to Bradford council, which recently announced that this and 154 other assets were being considered for sale, in order to plug a gap in the local authority’s finances by raising a hoped-for £60m.
The OWO is a five-star hotel in Whitehall, London, an Edwardian baroque palazzo that was formerly the old War Office – “London’s most storied address”, as the hyperbolic blurb has it. It is run by the Raffles hotel chain, following a six-year “definitive transformation” by the transnational conglomerate Hinduja Group and the investment management firm Onex Holding, for a total project cost of $1.5bn (£1.2bn). Here guests can stay in ornate spaces touched by association with figures such as Winston Churchill, TE Lawrence and Ian Fleming, who all used to work in the building. Prices start at £1,000 a night for rooms and £20,000 a night for “heritage” suites. Or you might buy one of the development’s 85 residences, including a 7,700 sq ft penthouse, for up to £20m.
With its magnificently tranquil art gallery, its ‘lonely library’ and its pointy white chapel, Aranya is a blissful oasis for burnt-out urbanites – and architecture firms are now clambering to build there
Every summer, since the days of Mao Zedong, the leaders of China’s Communist party have decamped to the coastal resort of Beidaihe to debate the country’s future from the comfort of luxurious seaside villas hidden behind high walls. Four hours’ drive from the distractions of Beijing, it has been a perfect place to escape the capital’s stifling heat, take in the sea air, and conduct secretive conclaves in heavily guarded compounds, in between refreshing dips.
But in recent years, the region has been attracting visitors of a very different kind. On a chilly morning, just a little way south along the coast, the windswept beach is teaming with style-conscious twentysomethings. Crowds of young tourists, wrapped in thick down coats, queue up to take photos in sub-zero temperatures – not next to statues of Mao, but in front of striking works of contemporary architecture.
Architectural gem has twice been badly damaged by fire and rebuild has suffered a string of setbacks
The responsibility for restoring Glasgow’s Mackintosh building should be taken out the hands of the city’s art school and placed with an independent body, according to leading architects, politicians and heritage experts who have expressed dismay at the lack of progress.
Thursday marks 10 years since the building – which houses Glasgow School of Art – was first badly damaged by a fire, which destroyed the Mack’s library, one of the world’s finest examples of art nouveau design.
Has architecture taken over the bloom bonanza? Our critic finds an elfin treehouse, a pixie grotto, a Roman villa and a £160,000 shepherd’s hut (with spa) now competing with the delphiniums
A gigantic Chinese dragon made of gnarled chunks of driftwood towers over a display of bog plants, puffing steam from its nostrils and clutching a ceramic pearl that gushes with water. Nearby, men dressed in togas patrol the courtyard of a pretend Roman villa, where simulated rain pours into the garden from a pantiled roof. Around the corner, a waterfall cascades down an artificial rock face, creating an arresting backdrop to a display of luxury outdoor sofa cushions.
Welcome to the RHS Chelsea flower show, a surreal phenomenon that has gone from an annual fair of prized blooms to a multimillion-pound Disneyfied spectacular, where the flowers now struggle to hold their own against ever more elaborate pieces of set design.
Every year, in the space of just three weeks, the grounds of Christopher Wren’s Royal hospital in London are transformed into an unrecognisable wonderland of horticultural fantasies. It is a place where elfin treehouses compete for attention with pixie grottos, and sculpted clay stupas loom above moss-encrusted ruins. It feels like wandering around a themed food court, with Moroccan tiled courtyards jostling with Japanese bridges, thatched Burmese stilt houses vying with Welsh dry-stone walls. The cuisine on offer might not be as international, but you can wash down the global garden safari with a £15 Pimm’s.
Begun in 1913, in a modest marquee, the Chelsea flower show has mushroomed into a town-sized endeavour. It has become a festival of terraforming as much as flowers, seeing more than 2,000 tonnes of soil moved around the 11-acre site each year, and hundreds more tonnes of rocks, concrete, trees and scenery trucked in from miles around – all for just five days of floricultural theatre. Now, for the first time, this year there is a “green medal” for the garden with the lowest carbon footprint, which feels a bit like holding an exhibition of bonfires, then awarding a prize to the one that produces the least smoke.
The beauty of concrete. "Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor." A long article by Samuel Hughes describing the history of how ornamentation is produced.
A mega egg in Paris, a hovering hotel in Machu Picchu, an hourglass tower in New York, a pleasure island in Baghdad … we reveal the architectural visions that were just too costly – or too weird
Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical French architect called André Bruyère submitted a proposal for a gigantic ovoid tower. His bulbous building would have risen 100 metres above the city’s streets, clad in shimmering scales of alabaster, glass and concrete, its walls swelling out in a curvaceous riposte to the tyranny of the straight line.
“Time,” Bruyère declared, “instead of being linear, like the straight streets and vertical skyscrapers, will become oval, in tune with the egg.” His hallowed Oeuf would be held aloft on three chunky legs, while a monorail would pierce the facade and circle through the structure along a sinuous floating ribbon. The atrium was to take the form of an enclosed globe, like a yolk.
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