I just recently encountered this picture of London's City Hall, an abstract, glass-encased shell across from Big Ben. It opened for business just over a month ago; I'm embarrassed, as an amateur architecture critic, that I wasn't aware of it. Now I'm all the more eager to keep my promise to my wife to take her to London within a decade.
Here's the city's website on the building:
http://www.london.gov.uk/approot/gla/city_hall/index.jsp
Also, Benjamin Thompson died last week. The designer of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Thompson preached my sermon on the importance of art and architecture being pervasive and relevant to all areas of life, and not just leisure for the elite:
"For art to be part of our life we must live with it, not just go to museums," Mr. Thompson said in a 1963 interview in The New Yorker. "In a way, things like museums and Lincoln Center kill art and music. Art is not for particular people but should be in everything you do -- in cooking and, God knows, in the bread on the table, in the way everything is done."
A promoter of lively urban centers, "he was just as much an advocate as an architect; of vital cities, human commerce, lively design and good eating," says the NY Times obit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/20/obituaries/20THOM.html
• Previous Architecture Watch
No comments:
Post a Comment