Newcastle Civic Centre, A Total Work of Art: Nordic Romanticism and Geordie Pride
While mid-century civic architecture in Britain is frequently associated with a utilitarian, monochrome austerity, Newcastle Civic Centre tells a c...
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Cumbernauld Town Centre and the Brutalist Dream: The Megastructure that Split Time
There are few buildings in the British Isles that provoke as visceral a reaction as Cumbernauld Town Centre. Built in the mid-1960s as the crownin...
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Park Hill - Sheffield, Concrete Utopia On A Hill
Park Hill in Sheffield was the largest and most ambitious urban renewal project in the UK during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Designed by Jack L...
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The Mechanical Sublime: Shin Takamatsu’s Ark and its Cyberpunk Vision of Kyoto
If Kengo Kuma’s M2 Building represents the hallucinatory, fragmented dreamscape of the Japanese bubble era, Shin Takamatsu’s Ark (1983) is its dark...
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Kengo Kuma’s M2 Building and The Sublime Strangeness of Tokyo’s Bubble Era
Few moments in architectural history match the logic-defying excess of the Japanese economic bubble. During the soaring stock market boom of the la...
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Isle of Dogs Pumping Station: London's Temple of Postmodern Architecture
“Architecture is more than plumbing, just as eating is more than an excuse to make turds” John Outram If you look to your left as you come around...
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Kyoto Station: A Gargantuan Postmodern Architectural Masterpiece in an Ancient City
When travelers arrive in Japan’s ancient capital, they expect wooden temples and Zen gardens. Instead, they are greeted by a sci-fi colossus. One o...
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From James Bond to Breakfast TV: How One Designer Created the Look of the 90s
London is full of historic stone buildings, but if you look closely, there are a few that feel like they jumped straight out of a movie screen. Som...
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The 50p Building: 4 Things You Didn't Know About Number One Croydon
If you have ever passed through East Croydon station, you can’t miss it. Rising out of the South London skyline like a stack of white poker chips, ...
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Japanese Postmodern Architecture of the Bubble Era
1980s Japan was a nation hurtling at exponentially increasing speeds into a seething, self-consuming, technologically fantastical, aesthetically ...
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Thompson Center, now Google Center (originally the State of Illinois Center), Chicago's Postmodern Civic Masterpiece
The Thompson Center in Chicago (originally the State of Illinois Center) is regarded as one of the most important postmodern public buildings in th...
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The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Buildings by Kenzo Tange, Imperial Postmodern Masterpieces
This blog describes Kenzo Tange’s monumental Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex in Nishi-Shinjuku, completed in 1991. Consisting of two vast bui...
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Humax Pavilion - Tokyo Postmodern Architecture
In the 1980s, Japan underwent an unprecedented economic and cultural transformation, driven by rapid industrial growth, real estate speculation, an...
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