Architecture

Acropolis Now

Oliver Wiseman — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 17:21:28 +0100

Author:Violet Hudson

Under wraps: The Acropolis restoration project is almost complete (WPopp CC BY-SA 2.0)

It has cast its shadow over a city for 25 centuries. It has been a monument of faith — pagan, Christian and Muslim — and to civilisation. It has witnessed the birth of democracy, the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of the Nazis. Plato wrote about it, Turner painted it and more than two million people visit it every year. But, since 1975, the Acropolis has been behind a veil of scaffolding. In an ambitious restoration project (the biggest in modern history), which is now nearing completion, the world’s most famous ruin has been getting a facelift.

Why Palmyra Should Matter To The West

Oliver Wiseman — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 15:05:44 +0100

Author:Daniel Johnson

Recorded for eternity: One of Giovanni Batista Borra’s pioneering drawings as they appeared in Robert Wood’s “The Ruins of Palmyra”

Albert Speer

Oliver Wiseman — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 15:14:57 +0100

Author:Daniel Johnson

Albert Speer: Not a mystery, merely a megalomaniac (illustration by Michael Daley)

Albert Speer was as fortunate in death as he was in birth. In 1981, on a visit to London — the city that, four decades earlier, he had tried to obliterate with the world’s first missile bombardment — he had dinner with the historian Norman Stone at Brown’s Hotel, chatting and carousing until 2 am. Next morning Stone interviewed him for the BBC. Stone found Speer “haunted by his past”. Perhaps he was; but the septuagenarian boasted that he had an assignation with a younger woman — an affair that finally disillusioned his loyal wife, Gretel — and seemed to be enjoying an Indian summer. Before Speer could take his lover to lunch, however, he had a stroke, dying later at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.

Pietro Lavini

Oliver Wiseman — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 15:01:20 +0100

Author:Peter Stanford

Padre Pietro: God's architect? (Illustration by Michael Daley)

Architects bandy around the word “spiritual” with abandon to describe the buildings they design. Usually, they are simply talking about the views out of the windows, or the amount of light that floods in through them, but for Padre Pietro Lavini “spiritual” had an altogether higher significance. His celebrated (and indeed only) creation — the Church of San Leonardo al Volubrio, high up in Italy’s Apennine mountains — was, he would say, divinely-inspired. His own role was simply as “God’s builder”, a phrase that Pope (now Saint) John Paul II later repeated in paying tribute to this remarkable Capuchin friar, who died in August at the age of 88.