Times Literary Supplement (December 1, 2023): The new issue features Godzilla returns! – Japan’s nuclear nightmare; Fear of flying at 50; Woolf and the Monuments woman; The lure of Vesuvius, Christmas Books and more…
Country Life Magazine – November 29, 2023: The latest issue features seasonal wine, medieval homes and our annual Christmas gift guide…
Embrace the festive spirit, with bells on, in Amie Elizabeth White’s magical A to Z of Christmas
There’s always a reason to biscuit, discovers Katy Birchall
Catch up on the etiquette of for-mal dining with Annunciata Elwes
Accessories to aid your festive entertaining, with Amelia Thorpe
Flambé is back on the menu as Tom Parker Bowles argues for the return of tableside cooking
Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler has a tipple idea for every occasion
A puzzled Ben Lerwill explores the enduring appeal of the jigsaw
Octavia Pollock finds a pig in a poke has gone for a burton
Hetty Lintell’s perfect present picks for everyone in your life
Country Life’s section editors reveal their festive fancies
The Nature writer selects a work in praise of the Southdown sheep
Tiffany Daneff marvels at floral creations from Rachel Siegfried
How did marzipan take Britain by storm, asks Matthew Dennison
Mary Miers on fears for the craft of stained-glass window making
Jeremy Musson explores the houses of Henry James novels
Kate Green on Aylesbury ducks
“This book should leave us inspired, and a little angry, in a fruitful way,” writes Alain de Botton in his foreword to this hefty, decade-hopping survey of modern domestic architecture in Britain. Kicking off with an Arts and Crafts treasure in Surrey designed by Edwin Lutyens as a rural retreat for “ladies of small means,” the book’s 50 featured domiciles—lushly photographed by Richard Powers—are pointedly diverse in style and context but unified by their creative flair, ingenuity, and ability to induce acute house envy. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Matt Hickman
Molly Hunker and Kyle Miller assemble a veritable who’s who of up-and-coming architects, designers, educators, and fabricators in Building Practice. Short, thematic essays, followed by interviews with 32 contributors explore what it means to build a practice, as well as how to practice the skill of building. Far from a run-of-the-mill compilation of flashy projects, this reader on the profession’s next generation offers up valuable insight that many young practitioners would be wise to heed. Leopoldo Villardi
Even though Alvar Aalto remains one of the most studied subjects in architectural history, his grandson Heikki Aalto-Alanen brings readers something new and unexpected—a love story. This deeply personal account of Aino and Alvar’s life together, replete with sketches and photographs, is told through never-before-published letters that reveal Aino’s often overlooked role in the creative partnership. As Sigfried Giedion wrote in 1949, after her unexpected death: “Their true secret is perhaps that, as people, while they are the complete opposites, they are also equals.” LV
Mass timber is often seen as an ecologically responsible alternative to concrete and steel. But this is not a given, since building at scale with wood introduces a whole set of new challenges. This is why Lindsey Wikstrom’s book is so welcome. While advocating use of mass timber for its carbon-storing capabilities and potential to be nonextractive, she debunks misguided assumptions and probes ethical and environmental considerations. Designing the Forest provides a deep dive into the material’s complexities and its opportunities. Joann Gonchar, FAIA
When Jean-Louis Cohen unexpectedly died in August, Gwendolyn Wright wrote in record that the profession had lost “the most insightful, wide-ranging, lyrical, and prolific historian of modern architecture.” Published posthumously, Paris Moderne, 1914–1945 surveys French design culture, from the overlooked to the widely known. Bookended with photo-essays by Antonio Martinelli, this encyclopedic volume would feel at home in the library of any historian or Francophile. LV
From the scantily clad figures on its cover to a ribbon bookmark that doubles as an architectural scale, The Advanced School of Collective Feeling is every bit as playful as it is a book about play. This jog through the history of physical culture vis-à-vis modern architecture features a series of drawings (beautifully rendered in metallic ink over black paper) and an impressive assortment of archival imagery. Taking the book over the finish line: a collection of somersaulting, weight-lifting, and jeté-ing silhouettes that are bound to elicit more than a few smiles. LV
Green-building advocates agree that the construction industry is in dire need of an alternative to its typical “take-make-waste” model. But, so far, circular processes are extremely difficult for most architects to implement. Reuse in Construction is intended to help address this problem with an in-depth documentation of K.188, a building-expansion project in Winterthur, Switzerland, that relied almost exclusively on reused components. In addition to this case study, the book discusses the long history of circularity in architecture, as well as a range of practical concerns, including legal, economic, and energy-related issues. JG
The World Green Building Council estimates that the built environment is responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions—10 percent stemming directly from embodied carbon from new materials and construction. Reclaimed offers an alternative to the status quo, demonstrating how to reuse materials for contemporary residential design. Divided into four material categories—brick, timber, metal, and postconsumer waste (denim repurposed as insulation, or recycled-plastic countertops, for example)—this thoughtful guide catalogues 24 houses and apartments across the world. Matthew Marani
Intrepid New Yorker and record contributing editor David Sokol travels the East End of Long Island, exploring how the area’s roots in Modernism are shaping its contemporary residential architecture (apart from the manses for the rich and famous). Highlighting 18 houses, on both the South and North Forks, Sokol organizes this richly illustrated work into three sections: Stewarding the Past, Extending the Legacy, and Setting New Precedents. Infused with history, anecdotes, and interviews, this engaging ode to a design movement’s influence in time and place would be an asset to many libraries—and it’s a pleasure to read. Linda C. Lentz
A chartreuse cloth cover with blue and tangerine lettering make this eye-catching showcase of residential work difficult to miss on a bookstore shelf. Nine dwellings—deeply contemporary yet full of historical references—slowly unfold over 304 pages, accompanied by the personal stories behind their making. But, reflecting on the collaborative nature of practice, the storytellers are just as varied as the houses. Among them are clients and contractors, as well as former firm partners Tom Kligerman and Joel Barkley. “9 Houses, 9 Stories is intended as a salute to our work,” Ike writes in the introduction. “It also marks the official end to the 34-year run of Ike Kligerman Barkley.” Each of the three architects has now gone out on his own, and readers will need to patiently wait to see what’s next in store. LV
Take a front-row seat to the detailed chronicle of the making, remaking, “ruin,” and revival of New York’s “symbolic soul.” From Times Square’s Gilded Age inception as a highbrow arts destination to its working-class takeover as a carnivalesque playground, then its decline into a destination for pornography and prostitution and the 20-year sanitization campaign that followed, Columbia University professor emerita Lynne Sagalyn doesn’t confine herself to the broad strokes of financial deals or political machinations. She emphasizes the street-level humanity that has persisted at the “crossroads of the world,” throughout the fluctuations in its identity. Pansy Schulman
Accompanying the Norman Forster retrospective held at Paris’s Centre Pompidou earlier this year, this monograph is undoubtedly the heavyweight—literally, at 26 pounds—of architecture-book offerings in 2023. Neatly packaged in a 19″ by 15¼” by 5½” cardboard carton, this two-volume edition (one is titled “works” and the other “networks”) presents the Pritzker Prize–winning architect’s life, work, and personal interests in XXL format, with writings by Taschen regular Philip Jodidio and Foster himself. Not suitable for those who prefer to travel light! LV
The story of Permasteelisa began in Italy 50 years ago. That small window manufacturer grew to become the company behind the facades of some of the world’s most famous buildings, including Renzo Piano’s Shard in London and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. This book reveals how the work of these architectural giants is made possible in part by companies such as Permasteelisa, which draws on its constant research into technology and materials to offer solutions for constructing the most futuristic buildings. With texts by international urban planning scholars and data analysis and georeferencing methodologies developed at the Transnational Architecture and Urbanism Lab (TAU-Lab) of the Politecnico di Milano, the book shows how Permasteelisa’s know-how has allowed it to shape the faces of many contemporary cities such as New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Milan, Hong Kong, and Sydney.
Among the art-gallery going public, is anyone still unaware that there have always been women artists, even before the 19th century? Perhaps a few still think that women first picked up their paintbrushes around the time they started campaigning for the vote. Certainly, the further back you go, the more surprising it may seem – given the limitations placed on women – that some were nonetheless able to build successful artistic careers. But beginning in earnest with the National Gallery’s blockbuster Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition of 2019, a flurry of shows has put the names of various Renaissance women in lights. Just this year, we have had ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker’ at the National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Mary Beale: Experimental Secrets’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: coraggio e passione’ at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, and ‘Sofonisba Anguissola: Portraitist of the Renaissance’ at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, to name only a few.
An underground nuclear arsenal in Israel dwarfs the tunnels alleged at a Gaza hospital.
It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another for a small child to use one hand to dig their way out of the rubble that has collapsed on them.
Words from populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower.
Editor’s Note for the October/November 2023 issue.
A variety of young candidates are signing up to run for elected office at local, state, and national levels.
October 27, 2023 through January 28, 2024
Combining highlights from the Morgan’s collection with carefully selected loans, this exhibition will provide a comprehensive look at the Tiepolos’ work as draftsmen, focusing on the role of drawing in their creative process and the distinct physical and stylistic properties of their graphic work. At the core of the collection and exhibition are substantial groups of Giambattista’s drawings that relate to major ceiling fresco projects of the 1740s and 1750s.
A fresh look at the style, function, and material properties of these working drawings has yielded new insights into their purposes. Most significantly, the exhibition presents for the first time extremely rare pen studies for Tiepolo’s magnum opus, the ceiling fresco above the staircase of the Würzburg Residenz of 1752, and a group of bold sketches newly connected with his ceiling fresco of 1754 at the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Pietà.
Other sections of the exhibition highlight the introduction of Domenico to the family workshop, the exchanges between father and son, and the great series drawings by both: Giambattista’s fantastic heads and figures seen di sotto in su, and Domenico’s drawings of animals, biblical scenes, and contemporary life.
The exhibition will end with a wall including striking examples from Domenico’s late Punchinello series. October 27, 2023 through January 28, 2024
The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next?
By Stephen Witt
The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.
The conduct of the trials, their fairness, and their possibly damning verdicts will be at the center of the 2024 election. Transparency is crucial.
On November 6th, Donald Trump emerged from a New York City courtroom, where he had testified in a civil trial alleging that he and others in the Trump Organization had committed fraud, and gave himself a great review. “I think it went very well,” he told reporters. “If you were there, and you listened, you’d see what a scam this is.” He meant that the case was a scam and not that his company was. “Everybody saw what happened today,” he went on. “And it was very conclusive.”
The German actress Sandra Hüller probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in “The Zone of Interest,” she reversed her usual approach—and withheld her empathy.
By Rebecca Mead
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Hüller stars as a successful novelist accused of murdering her husband. The camera often lingers on her face as it shifts like quicksilver between playfulness, defiance, and evasion.Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (November 17, 2023): The latest issue features Was Peace Ever Possible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict?; Finding a Moral Center in This Era of War; The Beatles Are Still Charting the Future of Pop. It Looks Bleak – Their latest song points toward a future where no golden goose need ever stop laying, and more…
Thirty years ago, a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed achievable. The story of how it fell apart reveals why the fight remains so intractable today.
MODERATED BY EMILY BAZELON
By David Marchese Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
Phil Klay, as both a participant and a writer, has been thinking deeply about war for a long time. In his two acclaimed works of fiction, the book of short stories “Redeployment,” which won a 2014 National Book Award, and the novel “Missionaries” (2020), and in the nonfiction collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War” (2022), Klay has interrogated, to profound effect and with a deeply humane and moral sensibility, what war does to our hearts and minds, individually and collectively, here and abroad. “I’m interested in the kinds of stories that we tell ourselves about war,” says Klay, who is a 40-year-old veteran of the Iraq war.
A polo shirt, a white apron and a retro hairdo changed an actor’s life forever.
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One of the rare 24-cent misprints sold at auction this week for a record-breaking $2 million
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A new Hollywood epic traces Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall through his checkered relationship with his first wife
In his eighties, Claude Monet was spotted by a younger artist, “old but still very handsome”, wrapped in a sumptuous fur, sitting on top of a dyke “in a bitter west wind which ruffled his long white beard, mingling it with the foam of the waves”. This transporting biography by the Financial Times’s art critic Jackie Wullschläger paints the impressionist as a man for all seasons, out in the dawn and the dusk and the snow, obsessed, possessed, with capturing the fleeting effects of light, shade and water, calm as millpond or whipped up by a storm. Chocolate box? Jamais! Monet mounted the barricades of modern art, revolutionising the way the world could be seen and painted. A book for art-lovers — and for gardeners too. Art and literature, Monet proclaimed, were all humbug. “There’s nothing but the earth.” Laura Freeman
Who would have thought that the outstanding art book of the year would be written not by a curator or an art historian or even an artist — but by a museum guard? For ten years Patrick Bringley worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, directing visitors to the Islamic collections and watching out for angry protestors. It turned out to be a remarkably fruitful experience. Bringley weaves the story of a personal tragedy involving his sick brother with startling insights into museum life and — most impressively — into the great art in the Met’s collection. Waldemar Januszczak
If you have been living under a rock in 2023, you will not have noticed that this year was the 50th anniversary of the death of Picasso. The rest of us couldn’t avoid it. Countless exhibitions, events and books commemorated the occasion, but this was the most useful. Focusing on the art rather than the biography of the man, it’s a generous and sensitive text with brilliant illustrations. WJ
Pauline Boty was “the Wimbledon Bardot”, “an ice-cream of a girl” and by her own mocking, ironic reckoning, “a happy, dumb blonde”. She was so much more than that, as this fizzing biography shows. Meet Boty the Sixties It girl, pop artist, voice-of-a-generation broadcaster and “anti-ugly” campaigner against hideous postwar development. Marc Kristal gives you the crumbling studios of the Royal College of Art, the creative squalor of Notting Hill bedsitters and the thrill of finding your feet (in knee-high boots) in swinging London. Boty died appallingly young, but her life was no tragedy. It was full of mischief, provocation and promise. This book brings Boty to life, painting, protesting and dancing the miniskirted twist. LF
Venice isn’t just the most painted city in the world, it is probably the most written about too. Finding a fresh angle from which to view it is a challenge. Gayford’s answer is to understand the city and its history through the splendid and varied art it has inspired. Packed with potted histories and informed anecdotes, this is a tome to pack on a visit to La Serenissima. WJ
Alberto Giacometti used to claim that really he would have liked to carve and cast voluptuous women such as Marilyn Monroe. “The more I tried to make them broader, the narrower they got.” Giacometti’s beanpole people became icons of 20th-century art and Michael Peppiatt’s compelling portrait cuts to the core of the sculptor’s “strange life and his stranger fame”. Giacometti’s Paris studio is a character in its own right: a filthy lair filled with the most extraordinary figures and fragments, with a leaking roof, a tree growing up through the floor and a local fox given the run of the place. Appalling and fascinating. You’ll never look at a Giacometti the same way. LF
