Nazarene Brutalism
Impressions of a visit to the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth: geometric modernism in the heart of the ancient city.
Impressions of a visit to the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth: geometric modernism in the heart of the ancient city.
What might a non-capitalist architecture look like? Owen Hatherley’s Landscapes of Communism surveys the architectural legacy of the old Soviet Bloc for clues.
A delayed flight home at the end of a holiday can have its benefits if the airport is Newark-Liberty, a few miles from Manhattan Island. I’ve spent innumerable hours in the airport en route to and from my wife’s family in Virginia, but had never had the opportunity to visit the city shimmering on the horizon through the terminal windows. An unexpected 24-hour stop-over due to east coast storms gave me the opportunity, at last, a couple of days ago, to spend a few hours in downtown New York, on a blue Spring morning.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been glad to help with the development of a new current affairs website, Sceptical Scot, which launched this week. The site hopes to bring more light than heat to the ongoing, intense discussion over the future of Scotland in the wake of last year’s referendum.
There will be many others I don’t yet know about. And I’m sure I will not read everything listed below. But here are 10 books to be published in 2015 I’m looking forward to, summarised in alphabetical order.
The stars finally came into alignment and I was able to take a brief trip to London last week to see a couple of exhibitions. They were excellent, and I’ll have a few things to say about them here when thoughts crystalise. But as ever with London, I also wanted to go just to wander and watch, to sink into the city.
The John Ruskin: Artist and Observer exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery includes many of his most famous illustrations of the city he idealised, Venice.