Astragal

Architect Piers Taylor hit TV screens just before Christmas as one of the contenders on BBC One’s Celebrity Mastermind. Fame-hungry readers will be encouraged to learn that the Invisible Studio founder counts as a celebrity, and one wouldn’t want to spoil this by suggesting it was his role as co-presenter…

The great and the good of global architecture gathered in a cavernous warehouse in Berlin last week for the World Architecture Festival, to compete for the World Building of the Year. The the event saw Will Alsop, Deborah Saunt, Simon Allford, Sadie Morgan, Peter Cook, Sam Jacob, David Chipperfield and…

Happy birthday to Peter Cook, who celebrated his 80th birthday recently. The Archigram founder partied in style with his students and fellow tutors at the Bartlett, where he teaches.  Following a speech from Thom Mayne, the octogenarian was presented with a brightly coloured jelly cake made by food-art specialist Bompas…

Reports have reached the AJ of misbehaving windows at Hawkins\Brown and Studio Egret West’s regeneration of Sheffield’s Park Hill estate. Some 15 incidents have been reported of glass spontaneously shattering in parts of the estate’s 260-home first phase.  One 12th-floor resident told the AJ: ‘It made a sudden loud bang…

This year’s champagne-fuelled Stirling Prize ceremony was made all the livelier by vocal and determined protests from Architects for Social Housing (ASH). The campaign group made its debut at last year’s event, to express anger at the shortlisting of RSHP’s super-luxury apartments at Neo-Bankside.  The protesters returned last week, provoked…

Tate director Nick Serota provoked the wrath of Neo Bankside residents last week by suggesting they put up net curtains to protect themselves from the prying gaze of visitors to Tate Modern’s new extension. His unyielding stance so angered one resident that they were driven to create a new attraction for…

ALSO THIS WEEK: TRUMP WAS CLIENT FROM HELL • THE KLINGON FACTOR A Sheffield woman has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise £150,000 to house ‘Jason’, the man behind the Park Hill estate’s famous love story.  Jason was responsible for the graffiti scrawled on a sky-bridge at Park Hill and now preserved in…

When BIG partner Kai-Uwe Bergmann lifted up the World Architecture Festival sign at the 2014 event in Singapore, Astragal thought this was a new trend. But the discovery of a Facebook group entitled ‘I was lifted by Kai-Uwe’ points to an unusual phenomenon that started long before.  Dating all the…

Creating gardens over rivers is proving problematic for Thomas Heatherwick