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

25 June 2011 | Zaha on Clyde: and the new wave of British regional museums.

Any new building by Zaha Hadid, the best-known and most successful female architect in history, is an event. I even went to Cincinnati once to see her first big art gallery and believe me, Cincinnati does not have a lot else to recommend it. Last year she won the Stirling Prize for her seductively sinuous MAXXI gallery in Rome. In the UK, however, she hasn’t so far built that much. There is a school in south London, a Maggie’s cancer caring centre in Fife, and the forthcoming London 2012 Olympics aquatics centre. This makes her £74m Riverside Museum on the Clyde in Glasgow – her first cultural building here and the biggest of several regional museums opening right now - an interesting case. full article

23 May 2011 | The straight and the skewed: Chipperfield’s two new English art museums.

This is a rare opportunity to compare and contrast two new buildings of the same typology in the same country (north and south), by the same architect, completed virtually simultaneously. I reviewed both separately for The Sunday Times, and those reviews follow. At the end you’ll find my new conclusion on both. full article