Slobodište Memorial Park : a walk through Bogdan Bogdanović’s heavenly war memorial

The realm of Bogdan Bogdanović’s thought-provoking spaces in former Yugoslavia is a feast for the senses, and a pinnacle of all art and architecture exploring memory and loss. “Most of my monuments are to the victims of Fascism, to the Partisan movements. They are monuments dedicated to suffering; they are never triumphalist and have no… Read More

Climbing up the slide : the annoying slang of architecture

Morphologies, programmatic adjacencies, and spatial compositions : it’s all Greek to me, as I take a long, hard look at architecture’s Rococo lingo To paraphrase a quote from one my favourite artists, J.M. Basquiat, I’ve first learned about architecture by looking at it. My ongoing fascination with architecture, and the research of its forms, history… Read More

Quest for the Corn King and the Spring Queen

Scythian pagan rituals may have informed this rarely seen set of monumental sculptures, cast using experimental concrete techniques. In 1964, acclaimed British sculptor William Mitchell created a magnificent work of art for the British Cement Association in Wexham Springs, Buckinghamshire. Seeing photos of that sculpture on the internet for the first time was somewhat unsettling… Read More

The Dinosaur Court

London’s fantastical Victorian bestiary of prehistoric creatures remains awe inspiring despite its age A few years ago, I spent a morning in south London, looking for the beautiful remains of Crystal Palace – one of the grand feats of engineering that epitomised the Victorian era. Joseph Paxton, the renowned Victorian gardener and architect, was behind… Read More

Sacred Inspiration : the Church of Agia Foteini Mantineias

In the sunlit Arcadian plain close to the ancient city of Mantineia in Greece, there’s a church like no other. It’s an astonishing melange of styles, combining elements of Classical, Byzantine and Modern architecture, and yet remaining true to none. Its construction is the life’s work of architect and iconographer Kostas Papatheodorou, who has delivered… Read More