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Forton Services and the Pennine Tower: The Space-Age Beacon of the M6

Forton Services and the Pennine Tower: The Space-Age Beacon of the M6

For anyone who has ever driven the long, northward stretch of the M6 through Lancashire, the horizon delivers a sudden, glorious jolt just past jun...

Kate Macintosh and the Sculptural Majesty of Dawson's Heights

Standing on the crest of Dawson's Hill in East Dulwich, looking out across the endless panorama of London, it is impossible not to be struck by the...

Banco de Londres: Clorindo Testa's Radical Concrete Poetry in Buenos Aires

In the heart of Buenos Aires’ bustling financial district, where the streets are traditionally lined with conservative, neoclassical stone edifices...

The Point, Milton Keynes, the Neon Ziggurat: Pop Culture, Sci-Fi, and 1980s Postmodernism

In the mid-1980s, anyone driving down the strictly gridded boulevards of Milton Keynes would have encountered a sight that felt less like a suburba...

Monuments to Equity: Social Housing as the Ultimate Arena for Visionary Architecture

There is a pervasive, modern myth that great architecture is born strictly from private wealth, exquisite houses, theatrical vanity projects, or va...

Cables Wynd House, The Concrete Crescent: Leith’s Legendary "Banana Flats"

To look upon Cables Wynd House is to confront post-war architectural optimism at its most heroic, uncompromising, and sculptural. Rising above the ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...