Author Archives: John Stewart

I’d often wondered how architects in the past got that incredibly rich sculptural detail onto their buildings. Did they have to draw every inch of it for the stone masons or did they have specialists in their team who just dealt with that stuff? I suppose if you are a bit of a genius likeContinue reading “Blog 18”

While in Verona several years ago, I had the intense pleasure of visiting the Castelvecchio. It’s the kind of place that you find again and again in Italy, with a history dating back over 2,000 years. The first building on the site was a Roman fortress which was located there to protect a key tradeContinue reading “Blog 17”

If you were an architect and you’d designed, Glasgow Central Station, Gleneagles and Turnberry hotels, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, the Savoy Theatre in Glasgow, Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, the stunning Wemyss Bay railway station (above), the first Hampden Park football stadium, numerous churches including the excellent St Andrew’s East in Glasgow, Caledonian Chambers, the AnchorContinue reading “Blog 16”

When we think of the Scandinavian countries, their contribution to Modern architecture and design is one of the strongest elements of their collective global image with the works of Alvar Aalto, Jorn Utzon and Arne Jacobsen amongst many others, admired around the globe. From the 1930’s onward, Modernism was more quickly and widely accepted inContinue reading “Blog 15”

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in India some years ago. After ticking off Le Corbusier’s Millowners Association Building, Louis Kahn’s Institute of Management and Balakrishna Doshi’s Sangath Workspace, I moved off into the foreign territory of traditional Indian architecture. Amongst theContinue reading “Blog 14”

I was watching one of the Remembrance ceremonies this week around Lutyens’s magnificent Cenotaph (above) and it reminded me of the extraordinary work of those architects who were appointed by what was then the Imperial War Graves Commission to commemorate the British Empire’s dead of the First World War. The best of these monuments areContinue reading “Blog 13”

One of the most interesting aspects of researching and writing a biography of Alvar Aalto was discovering what was happening in his personal life during the most creative periods of his career. His ‘Experimental Villa’ was a case in point. It was located on what was then a small island, just a few miles fromContinue reading “Blog 12”

Every so often you come across a little gem. In writing my book on ‘Twentieth Century Town Halls’ I was keen to provide the broadest possible range of case studies in terms of architectural style, location and scale as well as covering every decade of the century. Some periods, notably the 50’s and 60’s, offeredContinue reading “Blog 11”

What makes great architecture rather than just good? Certainly, I think it has to work on many levels and also include some meaning that lifts it above mere form and function. Enter Gunnar Asplund, who prior to his conversion to Modernism, was the leader of an exceptionally fine group of Nordic Classicists. He had littleContinue reading “Blog 10”

Finally, a client asks you to design a cathedral – only one drawback – he wants you to design it in the Byzantine style and you’ve spent your entire career up to this point designing Gothic buildings. This was the dilemma facing architect John Francis Bentley (1839-1902) when he was commissioned to design Westminster RomanContinue reading “Blog 9”