Gabion is the site of Hugh Pearman, London-based architecture and design critic. Hugh has been attached to The Sunday Times, London, since 1986, writes for a wide range of other design and consumer titles, is the author of several books, and frequently teaches and lectures. What you find here is a selection - by no means exhaustive - of his writings in various media, including the full, uncut versions of articles previously published in The Sunday Times. http://www.hughpearman.com http://www.hughpearman.com/images/banner_rss.jpg http://www.hughpearman.com 100 43 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. http://www.hughpearman.com/2010/07.html 2010-07-08 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. http://www.hughpearman.com/2010/06.html 2010-06-30 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. http://www.hughpearman.com/2010/05.html 2010-05-31 It's fair to say that it has not gone down well. The observation tower/giant public sculpture proposed for the 2012 Olympics site by the Mayor of London, designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor with engineer Cecil Balmond of Arup, and largely funded by a steel magnate who happens to be Britain's richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, is widely derided, not least by me. http://www.hughpearman.com/2010/04.html 2010-03-31 Seconds out, round two. There was a bit of a brouhaha back in 2002 when biographer Stephen Games first pointed out that beloved English art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was in fact a proud German who wanted to stay in Germany after Hitler came to power. That was in the introduction to "Pevsner on Art and Architecture", a collection of the great man's BBC radio talks. Enraged broadsheet commentators queued up to accuse him of suggesting that, despite his Jewish origins, this national treasure was some kind of closet Nazi. Games rebutted the charge forcibly then, and does so again here, but he clearly relished the publicity it brought. Now, finally, we have the first part of the full biography that Games has been working on for most of his adult life. More background to the revelations: expect more outrage. http://www.hughpearman.com/2010/03.html 2010-03-28