Blog

Studying architecture - let's get started! -06 September 2021

Dr Robert Schmidt III is a Reader in Architectural Design and the Head of Architecture at Loughborough University. In his guest blog, he introduces us to the RIBA Part 1 course, and showcases a suggested architecture reading list for students.

As you are about to embark on a lifelong journey of exploration, creativity and critical thought into the spaces that we craft around us, this is a tremendously exciting time in your life.
Architectural education will challenge and push you to think creat...

I do like to be beside the seaside! -31 August 2021

Will Wiles takes us on a local, UK holiday, with this selection of books on British seasides and their architecture.

The pleasure pier is such an established part of the scenery of the British seaside that we forget their fantastical nature. They are “the most precarious and transitory of built structures”, writes Fred Gray in The Architecture of British Seaside Piers. It is, in some ways, “ludicrous” to build over the hostile margin of land and sea. A pier straddles three different types of...

Review of "Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency" by Barnabas Calder – an energetic global history of architecture -26 July 2021 When the great pyramid of Khufu was built, it was faced with pale, smooth limestone, covering up the massive, rough stones that can still be visited today. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing 2,000 years after the pyramid was built and 2,500 years before our own age, the limestone bore inscriptions recording some of the stupendous effort that went into the project. Forty tonnes of silver was used to buy ‘prodigious quantities’ of radishes, onions and leeks to augment the diet of the workforce. This was the immense tomb’s energy component: Egyptian sunlight, captured as chemical energy in root vegetables, being used to fuel thousands of sweating labourers.

How to get your head round being an architect -01 December 2020 Think Like An Architect: How to develop critical, creative and collaborative problem-solving skills

Lives in Architecture: Terry Farrell -01 December 2020

Lives in Architecture: Terry Farrell is a compelling personal account of Terry Farrell’s life in architecture, as an influential Postmodern designer, architect-planner and principal of a leading global practice.

Farrell reflects on his most important and most enjoyable projects, satisfaction, obstacles and his greatest treasure in a new series capturing lessons from some of the profession’s best known and experienced practitioners.

Pamela Buxton interviews Terry Farrel for RIBAJ.

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