letter from london

This week World Architecture Festival celebrated its move to the Asian region with a launch party in Singapore, hosted by our long-term sponsor and supporter, FIgueras. It took place in the Helipad Bar in the Central development opposite Clarke Quay, where more than 150 local architects enjoyed Spanish food and wine, and four won prizes [...]

World Architecture Festival 2012 is on the move – to Singapore, where this year’s event will take place on October 3, 4 and 5.

The venue is Marina Bay Sands, the extraordinary hotel and convention complex designed by Moshie Safdie and opened in 2011.
Our move, after four happy years in Barcelona, is partly to reflect [...]

The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland had kindly invited me to speak at its annual fellows’ dinner, which took place in Glasgow last week. It came as a complete surprise to be made an honorary fellow myself – a real privilege.

Another recipient was the veteran Labour politician Tam Dalyell, Old Etonian scourge [...]

With about 18,000 visitors this year, Europe’s biggest property event, Mipim, was busy without becoming manic. Assembled hordes of developers, funders, agents, architects and others even further down the food chain shivered for the first two days, then basked in sunshine as the Croisette began to enjoy Spring.

The London pavilion was as lively as [...]

The increasingly impertinent claims to authority by Unesco, the unelected Paris-based bureaucracy, should be firmly rejected by the UK government as soon as is possible. For as part of its gauleiter operations to dictate to cities and nations what they should do with their built history, Unesco has begun throwing its weight about in relation [...]

All eyes will be on London later this year when the Olympic finally hit town – and we work out whether the UK taxpayer contribution to the event, more than £9 billion – looks like money well spent.
In my view the answer is a resounding yes, for a variety of reasons. First the Games provided [...]

The final dinner at last week’s World Architecture festival was held in the inimitable surroundings of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, courtesy of the Mies Foundation and the City of Barcelona. The pavilion can be transformed into a temporary restaurant, seating 64 people at eight tables. I think it is fair to say that [...]

World Architecture Festival is nearly upon us, and with just a few days to go, we are all very excited about this year’s event, our spin-off show’ Inside: World Festival of Interiors’ which takes place in the same venue at the same time, and the fact that we have made it to the the fourth [...]

Following the Fukushima disaster it looked as though the triennial congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA) in Tokyo might have to be cancelled, partly because of the time and resources needed in responding to the crisis, and partly because of concern that there would be reluctance on the part of potential overseas delegates [...]

Talk to any architect anywhere in the world about architectural education and you will soon be embroiled in a mixture of personal reminiscence and propositions about better ways of teaching. Unless of course you are talking to teachers, in which case you will get gossip about extraordinary back-biting and knife-throwing, but an underlying feeling of [...]