28 June 2009 | A rock and a hard place: the New Acropolis Museum, Athens

Up there on the rock of the Acropolis, that's the Parthenon. Down here on the lower slopes, that's the £110m New Acropolis Museum. Inside the museum is a lot of fascinating and very beautiful sculpture from the Acropolis, exquisitely presented. And in another museum 1,486 miles away, there's quite a lot too. At the British Museum, they prefer not to call them the Elgin Marbles these days, though it was our Lord Elgin - ambassador to the Ottoman Empire - who chiselled them off at the beginning of the 19th century and brought them to London. You may have heard that the Greeks want them back. full article

6 June 2009 | The dark knights return: four profoundly unfashionable buildings in London.

Number One, Poultry, is an office and retail corner block at the heart of the City of London by James Stirling, first designed in 1985, but only completed posthumously by Michael Wilford in 1997. It is a good and interesting building, publicly permeable, multi-layered, the antidote to most commercial speculations of the time. But it is also 1980s post-modern (PoMo) in style. The style is not yet old enough to have come back into favour. So the big fat Pharaonic hen of Poultry - look, you can see the folded wings, and its beak, and it sits on a circular nest - must bide its time. It is generally regarded as a late aberration by a once-great architect. Besides, the design replaced an unbuilt slab by Mies van der Rohe, an architect openly worshipped by devotees. No, it is just not done, to like Number One Poultry. full article

1 June 2009 | Stirling of Stirlings: Mackintosh, the lion and the unicorn.

Well, I'm surprised. When I asked you to vote online for the best British-designed building of the past 175 years, I imagined you might go for something ultra-modern and popular like the Gherkin or the Eden Project in Cornwall. Or - given that traditionalism is getting a lot of press right now - for something reassuringly old and solid. Like the Palace of Westminster, or the Natural History Museum. But you didn't do either. You went instead for a century-old masterpiece by a tragic genius that stands exactly between ancient and modern. Completed in 1909, it's the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. What does this say about our attitude to architecture today? full article

13 May 2009 | Sex, spies, the Beatles and the Mini: the original minimalist motor car

They nicknamed it "Sputnik", did the people charged with the task of designing and building the original Mini car. It was the end of 1957 and the eponymous Russian satellite, the world's first, had recently been launched. That tells you just how old this car is. They only finally stopped making it in October 2000. Since when, a bloated BMW has called itself MINI, but nobody is fooled: that's just an estate agents' runaround. Production of the real Mini started in May 1959. It is thus 50 years old, hence these books. full article

4 May 2009 | The amoebic house: Simon Conder returns to Dungeness

Dungeness is a large, roughly triangular shingle peninsula that extrudes from the south-eastern coast of Britain into the English Channel. It is home to a strange assortment of buildings and activities, from tiny fishermen's huts to a giant nuclear power station by way of lighthouses and a miniature steam railway. Once considered the back of beyond, it was a place of squatter communities. Today it is borderline fashionable, a nature reserve and a conservation area. It is here that architect Simon Conder has built his latest eccentric house. full article