The first of Mitterrand’s grands projets, the Arab World Institute was born of an unlikely marriage between a politically charged brief and an architect with a penchant for nightclubs and radical ideas.
The enigmatic concrete spaceship that stands at the centre of Los Angeles International Airport stands as a monument to misplaced optimism, missed opportunities and swinging sixties glamour.
Designed by a lifelong communist for a wealthy media magnate, Lina Bo Bardi’s uncompromising art museum is full of contradictions – just like the Italian architect’s life.
Once the epicentre of Hollywood’s nascent artistic and architectural scene, Rudolph Schindler’s extraordinary home was a stepping stone to Los Angeles’ great leap into modernity.
The astonishing renovation of the lower level of a centuries-old palazzo seduced a whole generation of architects and helped Carlo Scarpa to acquire a cult status that haunts Venetian architects today.
Ian Volner revisits Gunnar Asplund's eccentric Stockholm library, which showcases the competing impulses of an architect who embraced Premodernism, Modernism and even Postmodernism – decades before the term came into popular use.
Overcoming numerous site challenges and political controversies, this iconic project by I.M. Pei is a testament to the architect’s ingenuity and foresight.
Luis Barragán’s most famous work, originally designed for a client in Mexico City in 1937, then occupied by Barragán himself, harnesses the power of opposites as well as referencing his devout Catholicism.
Designed for a street plan that was never realised and an occupant that ceased to exist, Centrosoyuz is a symbol of a dysfunctional state and Le Corbusier’s thwarted ambitions to become the standard-bearer for modernism in the USSR, writes Ian Volner.
Confident and serene, Michael Graves' Denver Library stands as a riposte to the notion of postmodernism as a mish-mash of populism and pizazz. Ian Volner assesses the enduring appeal of a building that has survived a quarter of a century with dignity and grace.
Is the Lloyd’s building a monument to reason or just a wilful mess? Contributing editor Ian Volner hazards an irreverent guess as to the motives behind Richard Rogers’ inscrutable design.
