18 March 2012 | Vaulting Ambition: the £547 million King's Cross station concourse.

What do they call those foam-plastic latticework socks they slip over your bottles of booze at airport duty-frees? Do they even have a name? Well, the new Western concourse at London's King's Cross station - most significant part of a £547m upgrade of the railway terminus and its surroundings - is a bit like one of those. Where the arching white steel structure suddenly funnels down in front of the original, re-revealed 1852 station booking hall, I keep expecting to see a giant bottle inside it. But this doesn't matter too much because the rest of the space is pretty good. It is an enormous, interesting, column-free semicircular room grafted onto the side of the old station, designed to relieve its chronic overcrowding. It has just opened for use. full article

15 January 2012 | Le Roi des Belges: the boat that’s a house on top of a London concert hall.

Oh, you think. This is a dream, right? You’ve gone up in a lift and there, at the top, at the end of a snaking gangplank, a boat is waiting. It’s called ‘Le Roi des Belges’. Why? And it’s perched on some kind of cliff. The river is way down below. And then you look around and suddenly – there’s the National Theatre! But seen from slightly above, as if – oh, wait. This isn’t a boat at all, is it? It’s some kind of penthouse. It’s got comfy seating, a big double bed, a kitchen sink, even a Welcome mat outside its front door, which is actually at the back, because otherwise you’d fall over the cliff. full article

26 November 2011 | High tea at Rothschild’s: OMA and the dynastic bank.

I was late, very late, but that was good. The press tour round OMA’s new headquarters for merchant bank N.M. Rothschild in the financial heart of the City of London had concluded on the top floor of its ‘sky pavilion’. I arrived to find a high-ceilinged, glass walled room giving new views across the City of London that for once justify the term ‘spectacular’. There were lots of people in the room, including Rem Koolhaas and his OMA design partner in charge of the project, Ellen van Loon, but everyone had finished looking outwards. Now they were all turned inwards, seated round a long table with a crisp white linen tablecloth, heaped high with delicacies. It was 3.30pm. An early high tea was being served. The sight of it, happening here, was simultaneously incongruous and marvellous. A vignette. Outside, an economic crisis was in progress, not that you’d notice. full article

15 July 2011 | “After this it will be all Danish butter-factories”: Philip Larkin and the architects.

Philip Larkin, who with his small output of determinedly unshowy, unmodernist and intensely evocative verse became the pre-eminent poet of post-war England, was the University librarian in Hull. He arrived in early 1955 from his previous assistant’s post at Queen’s University Belfast. This was to be Larkin’s breakthrough year, with the publication of The Less Deceived, coincidentally by the tiny Hull-based Marvell Press, run by George and Jean Hartley. He feared that he might not land the Hull job on account of his poem Toads, previously published in the Hartleys’ poetry magazine Listen. full article