Edwin Heathcote

London

Architecture and Design Critic at Financial Times

Contributor at The Architectural Review

Architecture and design critic @ft Author, designer and editor of @Reading_design Latest book: ‘On the Street: In-Between Architecture’.

Articles

Trump’s casino rococo White House and the politics of ornamentation

4 days ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

It was a curious little snippet of investigative journalism, though from an unusual direction.
The Ikea dream may be dimming for the young

1 week ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

The writer is the FT’s architecture and design criticOxford Street and its neighbourhood were once the heart of London’s furniture retail.
What is Bauhaus? Everything you need to know

2 weeks ago | wallpaper.com | Edwin Heathcote

The cover of the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto featured an expressionist woodcut of a Gothic cathedral with dazzling stars shooting beams from its towers. Drawn by Bauhaus founder architect Walter Gropius, the manifesto kicked off with the phrase ‘The ultimate goal of all art is the building.'Yet the Bauhaus, which has come to represent more than anything a style of stripped, modernist, functional architecture, did not initially even have an architecture department.
What does chair obsessive Deyan Sudjic sit on at home?

2 weeks ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

If the ground floor of Deyan Sudjic’s north London house looks a little bare – all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and a...
Elizabeth Diller’s High Line remade Manhattan. Now she’s taking on the world

3 weeks ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

Elizabeth Diller’s office is in a corner of a huge, open-plan loft in a former warehouse building in Chelsea.
‘The trees will be cyborgs’: meet the architect turning to plant intelligence

3 weeks ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

“We now understand that plants shape the environment more than it shapes them,” Bas Smets tells me.
What not to miss at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale

3 weeks ago | theartnewspaper.com | Edwin Heathcote

Carlo Ratti’s big idea for this year’s architecture biennale is that we should perhaps let go a little of the utopian fantasy of instantaneous decarbonisation and instead think about how architecture might allow us to adapt for a fast-changing, overheating and watery future. The architect and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) academic flits easily between science, design and tech, which might make for a very open, if not very conventional biennale.
Untapped - LinYee Yuan

1 month ago | untappedjournal.com | LinYee Yuan |Edwin Heathcote |Jesse Dorris

In Brooklyn winters, sunset can start as early as 4 p.m. The sky is gray, the windchill is biting, and the city is covered in a crusty film of salt. Even in this season of darkness (and in the now-tempting light of spring), dozens of neighbors have been gathering every Sunday afternoon in a local bar to plant the seeds for how they might build a forest garden in the Central Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights.
All aboard for Dropcity, a new design hub in Milan’s old railway arches

1 month ago | ft.com | Edwin Heathcote

When the railways ploughed into the centres of cities in the 19th century they left in their wake dark, sooty labyrinths of brick-encased...
Peter Shire and Ryan Preciado Talk Cups, Memphis, and Making Things That Last

1 month ago | untappedjournal.com | Mark Byrnes |Jonathan Griffin |Peter Shire |Edwin Heathcote

Echo Park, Los Angeles, where the artist and designer Peter Shire was born, in 1947, is a quiet enclave which, around the time of his childhood, was colloquially known as “Red Hill” for its reputation as a haven for left-wingers.