6 August 2010 | Surf's up: Return to the Tate St. Ives

It can be a strange thing, revisiting a building you last saw brand new, years ago. I have just returned to the Tate St. Ives, for the first time since it was finished in 1993. Back then, it was one of a clutch of Thatcher-era public buildings being completed as Britain emerged cautiously from recession under John Major's Tory government. Others from this period were the National Gallery extension by the Venturis, Michael Hopkins' Glyndebourne Opera House, and Grimshaw's Waterloo International Terminal. The Tate St. Ives, however, was another matter. Designed by veteran modernists Eldred Evans and David Shalev, pals of and in Eldred's case the early-1960s girlfriend of James Stirling, this was from their vaguely post-modern phase. It had earlier yielded their Truro Crown Court and was to culminate in their weirdly neoclassical Jesus College Library in Cambridge. full article

8 July 2010 | Yes, we can see it's red. Anything else? Jean Nouvel's 2010 Serpentine Pavilion.

When did I first meet Jean Nouvel? Must have been around 1980. He hadn't built much then, though I have a memory of vaguely postmodern bits and bobs in the Parisian suburbs and satellite new towns, which don't seem to appear in his published oeuvre. Certainly some of what he showed me was the work of his friends. He was a bit surly back then, as befitted a rebel (he'd started a protest organisation, the Syndicat d'Architecture, as a leftist riposte to the moribund official French architecture institute). He was certainly a lot thinner than now, though oddly (given his bullet-headed look today) I can't remember what his hair was like: the arched eyebrows were always the thing. He drove me round outer Paris very fast in a black Renault 5 Alpine, first of the 'hot hatches'. We struggled with my A-level French: he was not comfortable with English until quite recently. Taciturnity was his default mode even in his mother tongue. full article

30 June 2010 | Shakespeare Central: the new RSC theatre at Stratford on Avon

There are two sides to Stratford on Avon. Both concern Shakespeare. They haven't had too much to do with each other over the years, despite being cheek by jowl in a small, pretty Warwickshire town. Tourists are one thing, theatre-goers are another and there's not as much overlap as you might imagine. This, however, is about to change. The Royal Shakespeare Company is opening up its previously hermetic main theatre to embrace the tourist hordes. full article

31 May 2010 | The Norman Foster biography that isn't.

Being the most successful architect Britain has known since the imperial heyday of Lutyens - and arguably since the Baroque brilliance of Wren - ought to make you a very interesting person, but that's no use unless you're prepared to open up your private life a little to reveal it. The trouble with Norman Foster - Lord Foster, OM, in fact, winner of every honour going in his profession and a great many outside it, a man who reinvented modern architecture and sold it to the world, Mr. Gherkin to Londoners - is that he is both very private and a total control freak. He is a biographer's nightmare full article