Herzog & de Meuron   United Kingdom   The Royal College of Art has officially opened its new campus in the Battersea district of southwest London, beside its old premises. The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron won the 2016 competition through a flexible scheme that would adapt to the constan

Grafton Architects   United Kingdom   The 2016 competition for the design of a new building at the London School of Economics and Political Research on Lincoln’s Inn Fields was won by Grafton Architects, which carried the day over firms like David Chipperfield Architects, Diller Scofidio

Carmody Groarke   United Kingdom   In 1902, in Helensburgh, 30 kilometers west of Glasgow and facing the River Clyde estuary, the Swedish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh built the Hill House as a residence fot the publisher Walter Blackie. As part of a process to preserve the buil

Stephen Taylor Architects   United Kingdom   A new porticoed shed with room for fifty cows is the most visible feature of the extensive revamp of a historical farm, a project intended to curb a widespread exodus from the countryside. Drawing inspiration from the barchesse, the agricultural wing

Flores & Prats   United Kingdom   The new auditorium is placed underground, conceived as a large foyer where the building’s horizontal connections converge. The character of the intervention is marked by the preservation of the three historical facades and the existing vaults...

Barozzi Veiga   United Kingdom   The Design District on the Greenwich Peninsula is a one-hectare riverside site with 16 new buildings that will provide an affordable base for creative businesses. Eight emerging architectural practices from across Europe were each given a pair of bui

Es Devlin Studio Veretec UK   United Arab Emirates   A sheaf of stalks of cross-laminated timber forms the scenographic screen on which to project a sampling of cyberpoetry that results from online interactions of users.

Herzog & de Meuron   United Kingdom   A work of Herzog & de Meuron, the building is a triangular glass disc with edges rounded to follow the shape of the site. The complex is characterized by a sawtooth roof that stretches in an east-to-west...

Groupwork   United Kingdom   A work of the architect Amin Taha, this seven-story block contains apartments – including this own home on the top floor – and the offices of his practice, Groupwork. Defined by its limestone structure, the building makes references to a ruined 11th-

Marks Barfield Architects   United Kingdom   Combining elements of local architecture and Islamic tradition, with geometrical decorative patterns symbolizing the infinite, this mosque was built in accordance with the scheme that won a 2009 competition, drawn up by Julia Barfield and her husband

William Matthews Associates   United Kingdom   A fruit of collaboration between the engineering firm Ney & Partners and the architecture practice William Matthews Associates, this footbridge over a 58-meter drop between cliffs recreates the structure that in the past connected the two sides of th

Adjaye Associates   United Kingdom   Mole House is a three-storey live-work space on a triangular plot in the heart of Hackney, in northern London, designed as a single-family dwelling for contemporary artist Sue Webster. The project came together as an exercise in excavation and retent

Glenn Howells Architects   United Kingdom   In London City Island, a peninsula on the Thames, close to Canning Town Underground Station, the new home of the English National Ballet, whose artistic director is the Spanish ballerina Tamara Rojo, is a large cube whose skin of translucent white gl

Counterspace Studio   United Kingdom   This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine, the popular gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, opens to the public on 11 June, a year after it was supposed to, thanks to the Covid-19 crisis. It was designed by Counterspace, the South African firm

AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects)   United Kingdom   Established in 2009 by Amanda Levete, the London firm AL_A has built two new buildings in the heart of the historic British university campus: the William Doo Undergraduate Centre and the Dr Lee Shau Kee Access Centre. The Undergraduate Centre com

Eldridge London   United Kingdom   In the Kingston Hill district of southwest London, amongst oaks and rhododendrons, stands this 505-square-meter house built by the English practice of Nick Eldridge, its glass-and-aluminum enclosure striking a contrast with the brick of the neighbori

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United Kingdom   The School of Science and Sports at Brighton College, one of Britain’s leading schools, combines two well-differentiated areas: a historic sector, composed of heritage-listed buildings, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott and Sir Thomas Jackson in the 19th

MVRDV   United Kingdom   The Rotterdam firm MVRDV has unveiled images of the hill it will be raising beside Marble Arch in London, to serve as a vantage point overlooking Oxford Street and Hyde Park. A 25-meter-tall metal scaffold will be covered with plywood, soil, and plan

Jonathan Tuckey Design   United Kingdom   This theatre for Horris Hill School in Newbury, a town in the county of Berkshire, England, is built with cross laminated timber (CLT) and Viroc composite panels – with a mix of wood fibers and cement particles – whose reddish tones resemble those of

Boano Prišmontas   United Kingdom   Since regulations did not allow to fix cladding onto the vaults, the digitally fabricated structural system consists of CNC-cut plywood boxes and beams placed using dry-joint techniques to support the insulating lining and the facade polycarbonate...

Sou Fujimoto   United Kingdom   Every year the Serpentine Gallery in London chooses an international architect to build a temporary installation. The pavilion of 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto, is inspired by the evanescence of clouds, inviting people to explore the place in a new

Foster + Partners   United Kingdom   The refurbishment of original structure, designed by Cedric Price with Frank Newby and Lord Snowdon in 1962, provides a new walk-through home for the zoo’s troop of Colobus monkeys and includes a new education and community center...

AMPS   United Kingdom   The firm AMPS, based in Madrid and London, designed this house beside the prime residence of the owners of a farm in Hampshire County, for use by friends and relatives visiting for long periods of time. Inserted into the English countryside, it reint

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   Born in controversy, the National Gallery wing was a lesson in throwing away the architects’ rulebook. Now plans to remodel it threaten its quirky splendour. The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, tucked into a corner of Trafalgar Squa

Kingston University Town House Conferred every year by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Stirling Prize is a recognition of the best new buildings raised in the United Kingdom. The 2021 winner was Kingston University London – Town

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   The world’s first multilevel skatepark could easily have come across as architectural dad-dancing, but it’s just right for its target audience F51 bills itself as the world’s first multilevel skatepark, a place where skaters, cyclists, scooters, roll

The Guardian   Joanna Partridge   Google has announced a $1bn (£871m) deal to buy the London development Central Saint Giles, calling the move a show of confidence in the return to more office working. The US tech firm currently rents space in the brightly coloured development design

The Economist   The 25m-high artificial hill at one end of Oxford Street dubbed the Marble Arch Mound opened in July. It was supposed to help lure shoppers freed from lockdown away from internet stores and back to Britain’s best-known shopping thoroughfare. But once

John Puttick Associates was awarded the 2021 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize, recognizing its thoughtful and detailed conservation of Preston Bus Station, located in Preston, UK, a civic monument of central importance that serves as a hub

The Economist   Peter Barber’s work offers a chance for a meeting of minds. On mcgrath road, a side street in Stratford, east London, a 26-dwelling modernist terrace in mustard-coloured brick surrounds a square. The development (pictured) is hard to pigeonhole. Pete

The Guardian   Josh Halliday   Liverpool has been stripped of its coveted world heritage status after Unesco blamed years of development for an “irreversible loss” to the historic value of its Victorian docks. The UN’s heritage body concluded at a meeting in China on Wednesday tha

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Norman Foster   The library of Manchester is arguably one of the most important buildings of my life in terms of influence. There I disovered Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, the work of Henry-Russell Hitchcock on Frank Lloyd Wright… I discovered those wor

Alberto Ballesteros   “Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place where nature had done more... To be mistress of Pemberley might be something.” So did Jane Austen imagine the incarnation, in manor houses of the English countryside, of a productive, social, and a

Be they coherent additions in dialogue with the preexisting, silent interventions on historic buldings, or constructions raised ex novo, the works conceived by David Chipperfield Architects to harbor museum institutions are luminous supports for art

The Guardian   Dave Simpson   As the spectacular Cornish bio-domes turn 20, their creators reveal how they were inspired by a lost civilisation – and a load of washing up. The Eden Project has generated £2.2bn for the local economy, attracted 20 million visitors and has regenerat

The Guardian   Lanre Bakare   Some of the finest examples of brutalist architecture in the north of England are at risk of being torn down, according to a photographer who believes a crucial part of the country’s architectural history could be lost in the process. Simon Phipps, t

The Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the highest distinction that can be given to a professional in the field in the United Kingdom, went to David Adjaye, one of the leading African architects in the international scene. Born

David Chipperfield   Finn Williams   Among the recently announced big government plans in the United Kingdom, the pronouncement that may well leave a more permanent mark on the post-Covid-19 landscape was Boris Johnson’s promise to “build build build”. The prime minister’s supposed ‘new

Stephen Bayley   Terence Conran, who has died aged 88, did more than anyone to enhance material life in Britain during the second half of the 20th century. Like John Lennon and David Bowie in their rather different ways, escape from suburban norms was his continuing

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   The area around London’s Olympic Park is a regeneration hothouse with micro-breweries, tech startups, speakeasys and spas. Now their spiritual needs are being met – with a beautiful chapel on a barge. A narrowboat moored to the towpath is offering pa

Inspired and financed by the recently deceased Charles Jencks (see Arquitectura Viva 219) as a posthumous tribute to his wife, the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres are a network of places devoted to giving emotional support and practical information and

1944-2020  Like Edmund Burke and Kenneth Clarke, Roger Scruton was a typical product of that liberal British tradition that knew to combine conservatism with a lack of preconceptions, and made clarity something more than a mere courtesy to readers. B

Grafton Architects  The Gold Medal of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) is the maximum distinction that can be given to a professional in the field in the United Kingdom, and it went to Grafton Architects, the office led by Yvonne Farr

Norwich Council Houses Given each year by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Stirling Prize distinguishes the best works built by British architects or studios in the European Union. In 2019 the award went to the council houses on

Opening day is several months away and the London Design District is progressively taking shape. This is a conglomerate of sixteen emblem-buildings commissioned to a miscellaneous crew of architects among which British firms abound – including 6a Arc

1935-2020 On 27 March, a coronavirus-induced case of pneumonia took the life of Michael McKinnell. He was 84. Born in Manchester, McKinnell attended his city’s university, then left to complete his studies at Columbia University. In the USA, he had h

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