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Dec 30, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Will Wiles
A new life of the auteur lays bare the obsessiveness behind his films and what it cost everyone around him
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Will Wiles
Broad Street, Oxford, as seen from The Store hotel. Photo: Adam Lynk
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
ribaj.com | Will Wiles
Earlier this year I visited Frameless, the ‘ultimate immersive art experience’, in Marble Arch, London. Famous works of art are projected onto the walls, ceiling and floor of large subterranean galleries, gently animated, and accompanied by music. The visitor experiences renowned and familiar works anew, and perhaps a few they don’t know. Then it’s off to the gift shop. Frameless is one of a number of ‘immersive’ experiences that have opened in London in recent years.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
dezeen.com | Will Wiles
Francis Ford Coppola's bizarre new epic movie about a visionary architect has been panned by critics. Will Wiles asks what it all says about the profession's role within contemporary popular culture. One of the characters in Charlie Kaufman's 2008 film Synecdoche New York lives in a house that's on fire. It's on fire when they buy it, and the fire continues for years. Eventually it has tragic consequences. The metaphor is not particularly subtle.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Will Wiles
From the April 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. London’s BT Tower is a strange phenomenon: a landmark with no location. To be clear, it does have a location, in Fitzrovia on the northern fringe of the West End. It even has an address, on Cleveland Street. But it always seems to be observed at a distance, never from directly beneath.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
ribaj.com | Will Wiles
They’ve been building a tower block in my garden. Not quite in my garden, you understand, but about 200m away from it, and the top half-dozen floors look down into my garden. It’s the first – and closest – of a coming group of towers on a former gasworks in my corner of east London, a massive development of 1,500 homes. Its main virtue architecturally is sobriety, and once it’s complete I’m sure we will stop noticing it.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
ribaj.com | Will Wiles
In May I toured the UK fetish archive kept at the library of the Bishopsgate Institute in London. The institute, a venerable cultural beacon in the East End, holds a number of extraordinary special collections devoted to London’s radical history and activism. Although less straightforwardly political than the collections devoted to feminism and protest, the fetish and BDSM archive grew out of the institute’s LGBT+ collections, and now has a distinctive character of its own.
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May 20, 2024 | 
ribaj.com | Will Wiles
In the mid-1970s, French-Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky made a doomed attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune to the big screen. This effort has become something of a legend in its own right, contributing to the book’s reputation for being ‘unfilmable’.
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Mar 20, 2024 | 
ribaj.com | Will Wiles
The ghostly imprints of passengers leaning on Elizabeth Line station walls are intriguing, intimate – and disturbing, says Will WilesBack when the paint was still drying on the Jubilee Line Extension of the London Underground, the scheme was widely celebrated for its quality of design and finish – a break from the network’s long-running, meaner way of doing things.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Will Wiles
From the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. Follow architecture long enough and you find that bits of it start following you back. You don’t have to work in the field – this will happen to any interested layperson. It used to happen mostly through books, magazines, exhibitions and so on, but in the age of the network it can happen every time you pick up your phone.
