13 January 2010 | Recession, what recession? The cultural-buildings juggernaut rolls on.

You know them when you see them, the great public buildings. It's all to do with unshakable confidence. The 1842 portico and façade of the British Museum has it. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1959 Guggenheim in Manhattan has it, as does Frank Gehry's Bilbao version of 1996. Two utterly different 1970s buildings - the National Theatre in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris - have it. The question is - will the Tate Modern's £215m extension have it? And what else is going to happen over the next decade? full article

9 December 2009 | How do you solve a problem like the Royal Academy? How about an exhibition inspired by climate change?

If you look closely at the word "Earth", you will discover that its middle three letters spell "art". This little bit of serendipity has of course become the logo of the Royal Academy's impending exhibition on art loosely inspired by climate change. But don't let the marketing people put you off. And don't let the climate-change thing put you off, either. This is not a breast-beating show by any means. And it signals something of a new direction for the RA. full article

1 November 2009 | This was the first museum. More than three centuries on, Oxford's Ashmolean has reinvented itself.

There are museums, and then there is the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was the first of its kind, in 1683. The first purpose-built place to present a collection of interesting stuff, gathered from all over the world, to the public. Now the Ashmolean is about to reopen after a £61m expansion. So you have the entire 326-year history of a cultural phenomenon in one building. Worth a visit, I think. full article

20 September 2009 | Home advantage: how the famous old Arsenal stadium became a new London square.

I sat high in the North Stand for one of Arsenal's last football matches - a patrician dismissal of Everton - at its old Highbury stadium in North London. The vastly bigger and blingier new Emirates Stadium was about to open nearby. What was going to happen to the old place, I asked as we queued for burgers and beer? They're going to convert it into housing, they said. The pitch is going to become a new London square. Oh sure, I thought. Like that's ever going to work.full article

20 September 2009 | A comic-opera stage-set: Britain's new Supreme Court is in a funny old building. That's the way we do things.

Suppose you were French president Nicholas Sarkozy, and you had invented an important new top tier in your legal system. You need a building to house your über-judges in. Well, you know what would happen. Prime site, international architecture competition, thousands of entries, and the end result a glittering weirdly-shaped edifice that appears on television a lot. And in Britain? Oh, we just do up an old court building we've got handy and bung 'em in there. Job done. full article