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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
Do whales make you horny? How about UFOs? Maybe you’ve always dreamed of having a tryst in a fairytale castle, or making love inside a gigantic biscuit tin? Whatever your weird fantasy may be, it can probably be catered for on a roadside somewhere in Japan, if a new book on the curious phenomenon of love hotels is anything to go by.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Dale Berning Sawa |Eddy Frankel |Tim Jonze |Charlotte Jansen |Oliver Wainwright |Evan Moffitt
Louise Bourgeois’s spider opens the museum (2000)Frances Morris, then head of displays“Louise Bourgeois symbolised what I wanted Tate Modern to be: a place where you would have extraordinary encounters with artists who weren’t in the canon. She proposed an installation with three towers for the Turbine Hall and we suggested also borrowing a small group of her spiders to put on the ramp down into the hall, to lure people in.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
A pair of huge turquoise domes swell up on the skyline of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, perching on the jumbled horizon like two upturned bowls. One gleams with ceramic tiles, glazed in traditional Uzbek patterns. The other catches the light with a pleated canopy of azure metal ribs. Both recall the majestic cupolas that crown the mosques of the country’s ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara. But here, they cover structures of a very different kind.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
What would the world look like if Kevin McCloud had his way? What if each of us had the chance to build our very own Grand Design, letting our streets be lined with personal visions, liberated from the identikit brick boxes offered by the usual big housebuilders? A glimpse of this world exists, sort of, on the outskirts of Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the country’s biggest self-build experiment has been under way for the last 10 years.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
“It’s like nose-to-tail eating, but for trees,” says Paloma Gormley, co-founder of the ecological design studio Material Cultures. “Industrial timber production is so wasteful. We should be making the most of every element of the tree, from its bark to the natural glue-like lignins and rosins – it all has value.”The organisation’s philosophy is currently on display at London’s V&A in a show called Material Cultures: Woodland Goods.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
He has papered our walls and carpeted our floors, enlivened our curtains, coats and cups, and even infiltrated Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet. Almost 130 years after his death, the Victorian arts and crafts designer William Morris has blanketed the world with his unmistakable brand of busy floral patterns, wrapping our lives with tasteful swathes of willow, blackthorn and pimpernel, peppered with cheeky strawberry-eating robins. There’s no escape.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
It is not often that the arts section of a newspaper finds itself concerned with the aesthetic merits of a sewage works. But then there are few facilities designed with the finesse of the new €139m (£117m) wastewater treatment plant in Arklow, which stands like a pair of minty green pagodas on the edge of the Irish Sea. Nor are there many architectural firms who have thought so deeply about the poetics of effluent as Clancy Moore.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
Four days after a nuclear bomb was first detonated over the Pacific islands of Bikini Atoll in July 1946, the French designer Louis Réard launched a provocative two-piece swimsuit at a poolside party in Paris. The two events might not seem to be connected. But Réard, who had been looking for a name for his design that would embody the tiniest garment imaginable, combined with the most explosive impact possible, hit on the almighty atomic blast as the ideal symbol. And so the modern bikini was born.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
Do you know your ant’s head from your shell mouth? Or your cogged lap from your scarfed gooseneck? These are just some of the mind-boggling array of timber jointing techniques on display in a new exhibition spotlighting the meticulous craft of Japanese carpentry.
