Olly Wainwright

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.

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.

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.

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.

2 months 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.