Architecture – parsian news

Fixing leaning tower of Bologna will take at least 10 years and €20m, says mayor

Matteo Lepore compares project to save 12th century Garisenda tower from collapse to 10-year effort to preserve the tower of PisaWork to prevent the collapse of a leaning medieval tower in the heart of the northern Italian city of Bologna will cost €20…

Matteo Lepore compares project to save 12th century Garisenda tower from collapse to 10-year effort to preserve the tower of Pisa

Work to prevent the collapse of a leaning medieval tower in the heart of the northern Italian city of Bologna will cost €20m ($21.5m) and take 10 years at least, its mayor has said.

Last weekend, the city unveiled a €4.3m (£3.7m) project to shore up the Garisenda tower – one of the city’s two towers that look out over central Bologna, providing inspiration over the centuries to painters and poets and a lookout spot during conflicts.

Village’s amateur archaeologists find lost Tudor palace in back garden

Collyweston Palace, home of Henry VII’s mother, uncovered despite ‘no money, no expertise, no plans’When a group of amateur archaeologists set out to find the buried remains of a Tudor palace in their Northamptonshire village five years ago, they knew …

Collyweston Palace, home of Henry VII’s mother, uncovered despite ‘no money, no expertise, no plans’

When a group of amateur archaeologists set out to find the buried remains of a Tudor palace in their Northamptonshire village five years ago, they knew the odds were against them.

“Many of us were bought up in the village, and you hear about this lost palace, and wonder whether it’s a myth or real. So we just wanted to find it,” said Chris Close, the chair of the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society (Chaps) which made the discovery of the Palace of Collyweston in a back garden this year.

Obelisk celebrating pioneering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu given highest listing

Aristocrat introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, saving many lives, yet remains largely unknownIt is a monument that celebrates the achievements of someone who would, her supporters say, be far better known if she had been a man.But now a 300-yea…

Aristocrat introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, saving many lives, yet remains largely unknown

It is a monument that celebrates the achievements of someone who would, her supporters say, be far better known if she had been a man.

But now a 300-year-old obelisk is being given one of England’s highest listings because of the remarkable story it tells of an overlooked medical pioneer.

Obelisk celebrating pioneering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu given highest listing

Aristocrat introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, saving many lives, yet remains largely unknown

It is a monument that celebrates the achievements of someone who would, her supporters say, be far better known if she had been a man.

But now a 300-year-old obelisk is being given one of England’s highest listings because of the remarkable story it tells of an overlooked medical pioneer.

From a 100-mile city to a desert ski resort: why is Saudi Arabia spending billions on architectural ‘gigaprojects’?

The Saudi crown prince is creating wildly ambitious projects masterminded by renowned architects, curators and designers. The upshot is either progressive modernisation or image-laundering, depending who you ask“We think we can help change the situatio…

“We think we can help change the situation here,” says Iwona Blazwick, who for 21 years was director of the Whitechapel art gallery in London, “particularly for women.” She’s wearing, like many westerners working in Saudi Arabia, a stylish version of the abaya, the traditional garment that extends to ankles, wrists and neck, but with her head uncovered. Around us is the profligate splendour of the cliffs and pillars of the local geology, not lunar or Martian but from some stranger planet, its bare wind-carved forms suggesting beasts and faces. We’re in the north-western region of AlUla, at the two-year-old Habitas resort, where 96 luxury cabins, each containing one bedroom, are scattered across an arid but spectacular valley like a high-end, low-density trailer park. A succession of influencers, posing in front of tripod-mounted phones, bring a Triangle of Sadness vibe to the infinity pool. It’s not the Saudi Arabia of the popular imagination.

Blazwick has been a leading force in British art over the past three decades: in 1992, she gave Damien Hirst his first major public London show, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and she played a significant role in the creation of Tate Modern. She is now overseeing Wadi AlFann, or Valley of the Arts, a park of land art to be made out of 65 sq kilometres (25 sq miles) of AlUla’s scenic desert. Here three venerable giants of the genre, Agnes Denes, James Turrell and Michael Heizer, with the Saudi artists Manal AlDowayan and Ahmed Mater, are planning to carve and build their large creations out of the rock and sand. It will take to the limit the proposition that art can change the world for the better.

Leaning tower in Bologna to be saved as city announces €4m repair project

Work to be carried out on Garisenda tower in new year after area around it was cordoned off due to collapse fearsOfficials have announced plans to repair one of two 12th-century towers in the Italian city of Bologna after the area around it had to secu…

Work to be carried out on Garisenda tower in new year after area around it was cordoned off due to collapse fears

Officials have announced plans to repair one of two 12th-century towers in the Italian city of Bologna after the area around it had to secured last month over fears its leaning could lead to collapse.

The city said the €4.3m (£3.7m) project to shore up the Garisenda tower – one of the Two Towers that look out over central Bologna, providing inspiration over the centuries to painters and poets and a lookout spot during conflicts – would proceed in January and February.

We don’t go to the movies for a history lesson, but shouldn’t Napoleon at least be entertaining? | Rowan Moore

You don’t go to this Bonaparte biopic for a history lesson or authentic settings – but shouldn’t it at least be entertaining?To the laments of military historians about the accuracy of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon, one could add some about the architec…

You don’t go to this Bonaparte biopic for a history lesson or authentic settings – but shouldn’t it at least be entertaining?

To the laments of military historians about the accuracy of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon, one could add some about the architecture. Christopher Wren’s Royal Naval College in Greenwich gets digitally spliced with classical architecture from France and Malta, so they all look as if they are in the same place, while Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire gets to represent both Paris and Moscow.

But such complaints miss the point. The film is entertainment – to expect factual precision is like going to Macbeth for an informative lecture on Scottish history. And, as in any lavishly produced period drama, there’s a problem with the fourth wall: even if the costumes and settings and turns of phrase were completely of their time, such authenticity would still jar with the awareness that it’s recorded with state-of-the-art, 21st-century technology.

Georg Baselitz’s erotic prints and the world’s best photography portraits – the week in art

Plus, Peter Blake talks AI in art, a dynamic look for hospital architecture and a 450-year-old look at the birth of our galaxy – all in your weekly dispatchGeorg Baselitz: Belle HaleineWitty, provocative and accomplished erotica by the great German art…

Plus, Peter Blake talks AI in art, a dynamic look for hospital architecture and a 450-year-old look at the birth of our galaxy – all in your weekly dispatch

Georg Baselitz: Belle Haleine
Witty, provocative and accomplished erotica by the great German artist.
• Cristea Roberts, London, until 22 December

The great orange oasis: inside Liverpool’s floating mental health centre

Forget dreary hospital wings with long windowless corridors. Alder Hey’s new light-filled outpost for young patients has a virtual ocean, a giant xylophone and a US-style diner that’s straight out of the 50sA chubby bronze bird perches on the roof of a…

A chubby bronze bird perches on the roof of a bright orange building at the Alder Hey children’s hospital, craning its neck to keep tabs on all who enter. On a bench nearby, a smaller bird looks up, its wings tentatively spread, as though plucking up the courage to join its mother on the roof. Two more cartoonish creatures are engaged in conversation above the entrance canopy, perhaps mimicking some of the family discussions happening down below.

It is a disarmingly cheerful entry to a place where most visitors arrive in acute distress, as the new home for young people’s mental health services in the region. The £20m project brings services together that were formerly scattered around Liverpool in a disjointed muddle of converted buildings, giving them a new base on the main hospital site, as part of Alder Hey’s expansive parkland campus. Designed by Cullinan Studio, with artworks by Lucy Casson, the new centre points to a welcome alternative to the usual dreary hospital template of anonymous sheds housing wipe-clean, windowless corridors. It floats on the edge of the park like a rusty steel ship moored in a dry dock, enclosing a pair of light-flooded courtyards, with warm wooden interiors and thoughtful details throughout.

The great orange oasis: inside Liverpool’s floating mental health centre