The London Traveler

A nice little video on The Times website takes us through Westminster tube station and explains some of the engineering wizardry that was needed to create the structure.
Okay, it’s a two minute video so it doesn’t go into nearly enough nerdy detail for me. If you want a more leisurely approach, there are some super pictures on the Metro-bits website.
And there is a marvellous article in the London Review of Books which analyses the architecture of each of the Jubilee Line stations – all built for the Jubilee line extension which was a Millennium project – as well as …read more

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I’m a big Ian McKellen fan. And his Richard III is, to my mind, one of the great Shakespearian performances.
But it’s also a wonderful guide to early 20th century building in London – the great days of Art Deco.
And what I think McKellen got absolutely right was the political ambivalence of this architecture. Take a good look at Shell  Mex House in the picture above – doesn’t it look just a bit like something by Albert Speer? The assertiveness of this architecture, its super-human scale, make it just that little bit totalitarian.
And certainly, when these buildings were put up, they …read more

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Every summer sees a new pavilion built at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. This summer sees a work by Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.
The pavilion is made half of wood, half of timber. Though it rests on four giant steel supports, it’s the wood and glass you notice – the organic weight of the one, the transparency of the other.
Gehry apparently based the design on military catapults drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, and there’s something quite spiky about the way the wooden struts bristle down the back of the pavilion.
But there’s also something rather interestingly random …read more

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