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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
‘We used to have something called social housing,” you will be able to tell your grandchildren, should you ever take them to V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new outpost in east London. High up in the atrium, at the centre of this huge open-access repository of 250,000 objects, hangs a chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist council estate in nearby Poplar that was recently bulldozed to make way for less affordable housing.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show. “It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion.
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
A teetering wall of gungy green bricks greets visitors to this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, forming an imposing blockade near the start of the show. The blocks are made of bio-cement, incorporating fishing nets and algae dredged from the depths of the Venetian lagoon. The wall’s steeply sloping gradient follows the curve of global population growth over the last millennium, terminating abruptly near the ceiling to represent the coming peak of humanity.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Oliver Wainwright |Olly Wainwright
Few parts of any city have seen so many style wars waged over their future as the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square. Nelson may be safely ensconced on his column, but another Battle of Trafalgar has been rumbling for decades beneath his feet, seeing architectural grenades hurled to and fro at the western end of the National Gallery.
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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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2 months 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.
