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How Our Ancestors Built
The Hudson River Day Line Building in Albany The visitor arriving at Albany, the capital of the Empire State, might be forgiven for presuming the riparian French gothic mock-chateau he first views is...
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Stave Churches
The category of the Stave Church is the only great Norwegian contribution to architecture. Sigrid Undset attempts to explain why other contributions are scant: As one of the most extensive and thinly...
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A Chapel for Chernobyl
The Belarusian Church in London Belarus was heavily affected by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the neighbouring Ukraine back in 1986 when both countries were part of the Soviet...
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Onze Grootste President
The London Residence of President Martin van Buren Transacting some business in March before the plague struck us here in London I found myself with a moment to spare and made a brief pilgrimage to No....
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Corpus Christi
It seems silly to let today’s feast pass without mentioning Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. It’s one of the smaller colleges, with about 250 undergraduates and a hundred or so...
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Wardour
The news from the West Country is that Jasper Conran OBE is selling up his place in Wiltshire, the principal apartment at Wardour Castle. Wardour is one of the finest country houses in Britain,...
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F.X. Velarde: Forgotten & Found
Many of the architects of the “other modern” in architecture were forgotten or at least neglected once the craft moved in a more avant-garde direction. The British Expressionist architect F.X. Velarde...
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A Palace for the States-General
A Palace for the States-General The nineteenth century was the great age for building parliaments. Westminster, Budapest, and Washington are the most memorable examples from this era, but numerous...
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A Scene in Buenos Aires
A hatted woman sits on a balcony, looking away out over the Plaza de Mayo, the Cathedral of Buenos Aires, and the city beyond. It looks like the sort of thing taken by one of the French photographers,...
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The Perfect Home Garage
The Coach-House at Saasveld, Cape Town With all of Suburbia working from impromptu home offices set up in their garages during Covidtide — presumably clinging to their space heaters at this time of...
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Pentonville Expressionism
When partner James Beazer of architectural firm Urban Mesh wanted to build an extension onto his Pentonville townhouse his tenderness towards brick expressionism took physical form. “I love the work of...
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A rood-stair pulpit
Among the features of the Church of All Saints in the Forest of Dean village of Staunton, Gloucestershire, is this fifteenth-century stone pulpit. It is built into a rood-stair that once led to a...
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The Other Modern: Otto Schöntal
The Viennese architect Otto Schöntal was a student of Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited this project for a Schloßkapelle in the periodical Moderne Bauformen in 1908. It combines a...
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The old Dutch houses of the Cape
From Here There and Everywhere (1921) by Lord Frederic Hamilton: THESE OLD DUTCH HOUSES are a constant puzzle to me. In most new countries the original white settlers content themselves with the most...
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Northern Neogothic
Will Pryce’s Photographs of the John Rylands Library Will Pryce is one of the best architectural photographers out there and Country Life put him to good use for an article earlier this year about...
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Gut Wulfshagen
I love when a house is arranged with its farm buildings around a garth or a gaard or a hof. At Gut Wolfshagen in Schleswig-Holstein the barns are arranged flanking a narrow pinch that gives just a...
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The threat to Bevis Marks
The Spanish & Portuguese synagogue at Bevis Marks in the City of London is well worth a visit. The last time my parents were in town we went for a tour given by an ebullient guide who was a big fan...
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From Buda towards Pest
A 1959 view from the Vienna gate of Budapest’s Castle district Taken in 1959, a photograph in the Fortepan archive shows two girls standing on the stone bench of the Vienna Gate — rebuilt in 1936 to...
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The Borough Synagogue
AS THE MOST ANCIENT of boroughs — and right across the bridge from the City of London itself — Southwark is presumed to have had at least a small Jewish community before the Edict of Expulsion in 1290....
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Theodore Roosevelt
The ancient heresy of iconoclasm claimed a new victim this week: The statue of Theodore Roosevelt which graced the Manhattan memorial dedicated to him at the American Museum of Natural History has been...
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