Ruins are a reminder of architecture’s transience, but they also embody often contested projections of meaning and memory
Reading the ruins
Author Archives: Catherine Slessor
The Silo in Copenhagen, Denmark by COBE
In remodelling a Copenhagen grain silo, COBE reconceptualises one of Modernism’s key exemplars
Skin deep
As a temporary prosthesis applied to facades, scaffolding is emblematic of wider processes of transformation
Estuary English: Redshank in Essex by Lisa Shell Architects with Marcus Taylor
AR House Commended: the presence of a modern shelter against the storm on this remote shore only serves to emphasise the fragility of the human condition
‘The CKK Jordanki by Fernando Menis is an intoxicating cocktail – and there’s nothing quite like it in architecture’s mainstream’
Fernando Menis has exported the volcanic geography of his native Tenerife to Toruń, Poland
Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in Norway by Peter Zumthor: ‘The progeny of an artist-architect’
Paired with a client who indulged his investigations into context, culture and materials, Zumthor has brought new life to a once-dead landscape
‘At Highgate House, Carmody Groarke have made brick an animate organism, giving expressive life to geometry and space’
Backing onto Highgate Wood, this house both embraces nature and reflects the local vernacular while being of its time
‘Peter Blundell Jones had the deeply held conviction that architecture is a social art’
Former AR editor Catherine Slessor remembers architectural historian Peter Blundell Jones (1949-2016)
AR_EA 2005 Commended: Pavillion in Alabama, USA by Rural Studio
Deep in a forest, this pavilion helps to reinvigorate community life
‘This is FAT’s last hurrah – and a fittingly raunchy valediction’
In the English hamlet of Wrabness, architects FAT and artist Grayson Perry conspire to create an ornatelyeclectic House for Essex
