John Pardey explores Marina Tabassum's Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, a modest brick building where primary geometry, natural ventilation and shifting patterns of light create a profound place of worship and community.
John Pardey revisits Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland, a building founded in history, landscape and civic life, and one of the architect’s most consummate works.
John Pardey on Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus in Dessau – a crystalline composition of glass, concrete and functionally ordered forms that transformed a new school of design into the built manifesto of a revolution in modern architecture, industry and education.
John Pardey on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Bear Run, Philadelphia – a contextual and formal masterpiece that revived the architect’s career at age 67 and made him a household name across the world.
John Pardey revisits Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, examining its conceptual origins, exuberant material language, and its legacy within a generation shaped by icon-making architecture.
John Pardey revisits de Blacam & Meagher’s Chapel of Reconciliation at Knock – a landmark of 20th century Irish Architecture – tracing its pilgrimage roots, profound materiality, and overarching influence on a new generation of Irish architects.
John Pardey on how Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel marked a revolutionary departure from his machine-age classicism — a sculptural, light-filled sanctuary where curved walls, hooded towers and a hovering roof reimagined the possibilities of modern sacred architecture.
John Pardey on how Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoët's Maison de Verre (House of Glass) redefined domestic architecture in 1930s Paris — fusing craft and industry, transparency and privacy, transforming a bourgeois townhouse into a luminous, steel-framed gesamtkunstwerk.
John Pardey on how Joseph Paxton’s pioneering Crystal Palace for Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the end of millennia of masonry and timber construction, ushering in a new era of light, span and prefabrication that would redefine architecture in the age of industry.
John Pardey on Jørn Utzon’s Bagsværd Church, Copenhagen (1976) – a rectilinear, industrial-looking building that conceals a sequence of vaulted concrete ‘clouds’ inspired by nature.
John Pardey on William Morris and Philip Webb’s Red House in Bexleyheath – a home that looked to embody ‘truth’ in craftsmanship and construction and which to some, is the very first modern house.
John Pardey on Hendrik Petrus Berlage's Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (1934) – a building that can be read as a European evolution of Frank Lloyd Wright's work and reconsidered the decorative use of stone and brick.
