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On a hot day in late spring, I arrive in Oslo for an exhibition at the Norwegian National Museum. I am poised to unpick the “New Nordic” aesthetic, which has, over the past two decades, grown into a regional brand of sorts — stretching from angular architecture to cool contemporary ceramics and tweezer food. But as I emerge from the city’s central station, I am faced with a celebration of Old Nordic. It is Norway’s Constitution Day, a national holiday, and the streets are bustling with bunads. 

The Norwegian national costume, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, is a romantic spectacle of folk embroidery inspired by rose painting and woodcarving. Waves of people proudly wearing them swell through a cityscape now punctuated by sharp-edged 21st-century buildings, such as in Bjørvika, a residential quarter on the edge of the Oslo fjord that also includes a row of tall, thin offices known as The Barcode. At the heart of Bjørvika is the new Munch Museum, considered by many as the nadir of the city’s contemporary architecture. When it opened in 2021, it was voted “the ugliest building in Norway” in a poll organised by Arkitekturopprøret (Architectural Uprising), a group founded in Sweden in 2014 campaigning for new progressive styles that fit with classical or local tradition.

New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place explores a distinctive movement that, argues co-curator Martin Braathen, has united Nordic architects, artisans, furniture designers and chefs since the turn of the millennium in shaping a locally focused approach to lifestyle design. Its guiding principles are the use of regional materials, a lack of decoration or strong colours, a belief in sustainability codes and a — hotly contested — foundation in authenticity.

But it seems that despite this quarter of a century retrospective celebration, architecture is becoming something of a fly in the ointment. And few places more so than Oslo. In the 15 years I’ve been coming to this city, the skyline has changed beyond recognition. There are two Oslos: the old and the new, the former revered by the public, the latter championed by a particular cohort of architects and property developers. 

In the exhibition, Braathen uses the rise of the Nordic super-chef as his chief protagonist. “A ramson picked in the local forest is as exclusive as imported caviar, and your grandmother’s old recipe is more important than the one in the cookbook,” he says. The local and the traditional are key springboards for innovation. “This attitude has spread into other disciplines as both an ethos and an aesthetic.”

Take Nordic tableware. Like the little rock pools of foraged seaweed they hold, many contemporary ceramics in the New Nordic vein also look to the landscape. Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Maaemo in Oslo, use locally crafted crockery. Sissel Wathne, a Lillehammer-based Danish ceramicist whose pieces can be seen in the National Museum exhibition, believes that the new is rooted in the old. Her work embraces traditional glazes created from foraged reindeer bones. “You can’t use industrial raw materials; I have to go to the mountains and collect them and grind them,” she says.

Critics complain that Nordic architects have moved away from this ethos and are instead working in a self-referential bubble. Old Nordic apartment buildings are much loved for their distinctive high ceilings and ornate detailing. The concern is that these qualities are being lost in the name of sustainability and notions of progress.

Saher Sourouri, an Oslo psychologist who is the spokesperson for Architectural Uprising, argues that: “Most modern architecture [in Norway] has this poverty [of beauty]. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on.” We are having coffee at a café in Frogner, the kind of unchanged historic neighbourhood he favours. If buildings tell a story, he says, then contemporary Nordic houses lack a narrative arc. “The facades are very simple, very boring. They’re flat. There’s no ornamentation. The windows are often asymmetrical. It’s all minimalistic.” And this aesthetic has become ubiquitous, he claims: “A lot of people wonder why everything has to be the same.” 

Developments in the Oslo neighbourhoods of Storo and Løren have been the most heavily criticised. And the campaigners are not just pensioners with a penchant for 18th-century proportions: Architectural Uprising has some 150,000 followers on social media (the number is equivalent to around 20 per cent of Oslo’s population). “On Instagram, about 60 per cent are under the age of 35,” says Sourouri. “The younger generation are much more interested in the classical and traditional styles of architecture than people my age or older,” he asserts. 

While architectural trends in the wider region have broadly shifted, Norway, with its newfound oil wealth (a popular Norwegian football chant goes: “We can buy all of Sweden, if we want to”), has had an accelerated rate of change, argues Sourouri. The “Snøhetta effect” has seen a wide range of practices adopt the monochrome palettes and rocky silhouettes favoured by Snøhetta, the Norwegian architectural practice behind buildings such as the iceberg-like Oslo Opera House and the grass-roofed Bjellandsbu-Åkrafjorden Cabin in the wilderness south of Bergen.

While it is celebrated for its foregrounding of sustainability, rooting to the landscape and social responsibility, there is a pinch point between striving to create a new design and architectural language and connection to national heritage. And while design elements at the Snøhetta tip of the pyramid are often seen as inspiring, the style adopted by bigger housing developments, much like the ideas of haute couture filtering down to the high street, can be less impressive. Sourouri describes the apartment blocks in Bjørvika as “cheap, colourless and bland”.

Most modern architecture in Norway has this poverty of beauty. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on

Oslo’s population has grown 40 per cent since 2000, and the number of dwellings has increased by 63,500 since 2006, according to Statistics Norway. All this, when the city is surrounded by forest on three sides and a fjord on the fourth, all of which are protected. Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museum, one of the first contemporary buildings on the waterfront when it opened in 2012, describes the rate of new housing development as “insane”.

“You have neighbourhoods where you had villas with their large eplehagen, their apple gardens,” she says. “But then came developers, real estate and money. People started to sell the gardens. All of a sudden you sit and you look at all these square buildings. They’re made cheaply, efficiently; they all have their garage in the basement and building on top. They are cubes.” She also says that construction work, concrete and tarmacking has been blamed for poor water drainage. Uniformity and environmental damage would be at odds with the New Nordic ethos. 

For Sourouri and his fellow rebels, the issue is about both taste and the wellbeing of residents. “There is a difference between what architects like and think is the right way to build buildings today and what a large part of the general public think,” he argues. “A discussion I was drawn into was that you cannot talk about ugly and beautiful buildings: it’s simplistic, it’s populist and architecture is far more complex. But almost everyone talks about ugly and beautiful buildings.” On Instagram he can be heard saying: “You have to wear horse blinders when you walk in new parts of town just to protect your sanity.” 

But not all locals agree. “I love the new houses in Bjørvika,” says Norwegian author Martine Jonsrud. “They have a very maritime feel, the walls remind me of fish skin and the shapes are like Tetris, or big puzzles for children. It’s playful and stylish.”

Both the uprising and the city’s Heritage Office have caused architects to adapt their approach. A mixed-used building by Mad Arkitekter in Oslo’s Torshov neighbourhood in the north of the city had to be rethought after its original Lego-like designs were rejected by planning officials in 2014. It took nearly a decade to come to a compromise. The result: an update of a more traditional Scandinavian style. “In recent years, the Arkitekturopprøret [Architectural Uprising] movement has contributed to a broader acceptance of such harmonious and context-sensitive expressions, and to a renewed discussion around beauty in architecture, clearly addressing a sense of longing shared by many,” says Kurt Singstad, a partner at Mad Arkitekter.   

Other Norwegians have found a sweet spot between the old and new. One is Eirik Sevaldsen, proprietor of Panu, a restaurant on St Olavs Plass that plays with unexpected mixes — turbot, lobster, rhubarb — just as the design of his home on the west coast of Norway blends elements from different eras. 

“It was my wife’s old family home,” explains Sevaldsen. “Her grandfather built the place in the early 1930s, he was a carpenter. It’s an old house, a classical house. When we took it over, some people said: just build a new house.” Instead, the couple supported the original structure and built a contemporary oblong extension with a vast glass window overlooking the Atlantic, the two parts unified by the use of stone from Alta in the north of Norway. Two styles from different times complementing one another, like accessorising a bunad with a beanie. 

“New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place”, Norwegian National Museum, Oslo, until September 14; nasjonalmuseet.no/en

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It’s often interesting, if not always useful, to compare architects from distant and more recent history. A new exhibition of the work of Richard Rogers at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London affords an opportunity to play that game, noting the occasional similarity or echo, and then the howling chasm, between these two hugely influential architects, born 180 years apart. 

The show concentrates on a handful of buildings to explore the themes that preoccupied Rogers over his long career, from modular construction to sustainability and social cohesion. It kicks off with the Zip-Up House, designed in 1967-69 by Rogers and his wife at the time, Su, and exhibited, surprisingly, at London’s Ideal Home Exhibition in 1969. An extruded yellow box supported on pink props so that it didn’t need foundations and could, in theory, be moved to any site with any topography, it remained visionary, striking and resolutely unbuilt.

He did, however, build a version for his parents in Wimbledon, still standing, still exquisite, if not perhaps the easiest house to actually live in. The original model, standing in the middle of the room, is terrific, a real blast of space-age bravado.

Next up is the Pompidou Centre, Rogers’ undisputed masterpiece (designed with Renzo Piano) and still perhaps the most radical reinvention of what a cultural building could be. Leaving half the Paris site free for a public piazza and creating a flexible interior, it became a massive warehouse for culture capable of reprogramming and reimagining as slippery media shifted. The conceptual model is tiny and gorgeous, in contrast to the beast it begat.

Then, in slightly similar vein, comes London’s Millennium Dome, the vast circular tent designed as the most efficient way to cover the largest area but with a New Labour vacuity at its core, a struggle to fill it with expo-lite exhibits. It is now a hyper-corporate, albeit efficient, gig venue surrounded by fast-food franchises — as perfectly of its era as was the Pompidou.

There is also the Lloyd’s building in its shiny armour of stainless steel vents, ducts, lifts and panels, a powerful reinterpretation of London’s fetish for Victorian iron engineering (like Leadenhall Market next door). Then there is the rest, from an unbuilt housing tower to the compact energy of the drawings gallery at Château La Coste and the details of the vast Barajas Airport in Madrid. 

All of this is framed against a shocking pink, like that of the garish collarless shirts Rogers himself used to sport. In this there is an echo of Soane. Move from the pink room to the (historic) sunny yellow drawing room next door and you get a hint of Soane’s own experiments with colour.

There is also something oddly effective in displaying these representations of buildings on an epic scale in Soane’s intimate domestic rooms. Rogers arguably succeeded where Soane failed, in building grand public spaces and shaping cities. Soane’s only real result in this game was the huge Bank of England (on which he worked between 1788 and 1833), almost all of which is now gone. His dome there may have been an influence on Rogers’ millennium version, as indeed might the smaller one in his breakfast room here in the house. 

Despite his global success Rogers, too, failed to achieve many of his professed ideas. There is a suggestion here of his undoubted efforts to produce an architecture of real and progressive social value. Yet he managed to build virtually no social housing in his lifetime, and his later monuments from Lloyd’s to the “Cheesegrater” at 122 Leadenhall Street were corporate monsters, while his housing, from One Hyde Park to Neo Bankside, was exclusively for London’s ultra-wealthy.

Rogers was a notoriously bad draughtsman, his sketches, like his writing, often barely legible. His medium was social, getting an office to work together. Soane was a little better, but he employed Joseph Gandy to create memorable images of the work, often after they had been completed. Gandy rendered Soane’s work in collages and, in one famous painting of his buildings stacked up in a room, somewhere between models and surreal doll’s houses. Most famously, he depicted Soane’s Bank of England in ruins, as if these works would leave remains like those of Rome, influencing generations to come, building the myth as well as the work.

That Rogers was a sketchy sketcher might have mattered not at all, but there are no credits on these drawings, some of which are spectacular, and that appropriation feels a little unfair. It would have taken nothing away from Rogers to see who, from Eva Jiřičná to Graham Stirk, was responsible. The exhibition was designed and curated by Rogers’ son Ab, who inherited from his father that penchant for vivid colour. No historic parallel there — Soane was desperate for his own son to follow him into architecture, but his lack of interest and then a ruthless attack on his father’s reputation in a magazine (after Soane had refused to pay his debts off) was blamed for driving his mother to an early grave and Soane to disinherit him.

There are parallels in the deceptive blend of clarity and complexity. Both architects’ buildings can appear to be simple, even bombastic statements, yet they also reveal layers of depth and entanglement with history and the physical city that keeps them fascinating.

It is jarring to see the first UK retrospective of one of Britain’s most successful high-tech architects in a house stuffed with fragments of classical architecture and sculpture. But it reminds us that Rogers himself was born in Florence, a product of the same culture of the piazza, the ruin and the continuity of urban history that defined Soane. Perhaps his house too, so emblematic of its age — a 19th-century pair of terraces stripped bare and opened up inside — and just around the corner from Soane’s stables at the Royal Hospital, might one day become a museum too.

To September 21, soane.org

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Built into the wall of one of the airy bathrooms at Ashton, an Edwardian country house in Somerset, is a set of spacious mahogany drawers. The house is filled with useful original features like this: generous baths with sturdy taps, large built-in basins in bedrooms, and a huge loft room where the current owners’ five children keep a train set. Amanda Campbell, who has lived there for more than 30 years with her husband, says she was seduced by the house’s generous proportions and light-filled rooms. “There is nothing poky about it,” she says. 

Britain is in the throes of nostalgia for Howards End-style houses such as Ashton and the interior decor of the early 20th century. The era’s art nouveau-style stained glass and muted-tone, geometric tiles are trending on social media, while online searches for its bathrooms and gardens have increased by as much as 100 per cent in the past 12 months. Edwardian country houses, with their beaky gables, square bays and timber detailing “used to sell for up to 10 per cent less than Victorian homes”, says Robin Chatwin, head of Savills’ south-west London residential sales, “but now there’s no difference — many buyers prefer an Edwardian house.” 

Edwardianism speaks to the past and the future, which is why it resonates today, says interior designer and architect Ben Pentreath, who has recently moved to a house with Edwardian interiors on Rousay in the Orkney Islands. “There’s a sense of modernity to good Edwardian design,” he says. “Light-filled spaces, layouts that flow from one room to the next, [rooms] infused with poetry . . . themes that would inspire modernism just a few years later.”

It also offers a sense of optimism and hope, he continues. After the sombre final decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, the accession of King Edward VII and his socialite wife Queen Alexandra brought light and colour to British fashion and interiors — as can be seen in the exhibition The Edwardians: Age of Elegance, at Buckingham Palace (until November). A painting by Danish artist Laurits Regner Tuxen, for example, shows ladies at a Buckingham Palace garden party dressed in pastel shades, a palette mirrored in the hand-painted floral occasional chairs and Danish ceramics on display. “There can be a real prettiness to Edwardian decor — the paint colours, the tiles, the fabrics,” agrees interior designer Kate Guinness, who has recently refurbished an Edwardian house in south-east London. 

The era’s handcrafted furniture was often influenced by the medieval style favoured by Arts and Crafts designers such as William Morris. “It has a sense of peaceful comfort,” Pentreath adds. “The Edwardians had wonderful budgets — fuelled by the late-stage empire and British manufacturing prowess — which means that the quality of the work and materials shines through.”

Houses of the time — Edwardian architectural style extends from 1901 into the early 1920s even though Edward VII died in 1910 — reflect this comfortable aesthetic. With fewer staff than the Victorians, the Edwardians were forward-thinking designers, prioritising kitchens, bathrooms and family living space. The main rooms are most often designed for both formal dinners and children racing around after school. “There’s a wonderful confidence to the houses — they’re solid, adaptable and never overly fussy,” says Oliver Custance Baker, of estate agents Strutt & Parker’s country house department. The Edwardians were also garden-mad, she adds, designing houses with front and back gardens and living spaces that flow outdoors to structured planting and herbaceous borders. 

“Lutyens is the most famous of the great Edwardian architects, but he was but one of a huge generation of talents — Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, Guy Dawber, Ernest Gimson, [C.F.A] Voysey,” Pentreath continues. “They drew deeply from the well of tradition without ever being dull.”  

It combines beautifully with mid-century furniture, abstract art and sculpture in a way that would feel a little jarring or over-obvious in a Georgian interior

At Ashton, built in 1914 for a colonel returning from India, Campbell has created a garden inspired by the horticulturalist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, with a pool and tennis court. Like most Edwardian houses, it isn’t listed, so she was able to open up rooms even further for modern lateral living, creating a vast kitchen with areas for sitting, dining and watching television, all with doors on to the garden. 

Her one regret is that she never went “full William Morris” with the interior; this will be for the next owner, as Campbell and her husband are looking to downsize. Pentreath, however, likes to juxtapose Edwardianism with other period styles. “It combines beautifully with mid-century furniture, abstract art and sculpture in a way that would feel a little jarring or over-obvious in a Georgian interior,” he says. 

Pentreath feels lucky to have Edwardian fireplaces with William De Morgan tiles at his new home. In many houses, Edwardian fixtures — such as original parquet flooring — have been ripped out. It’s now being reinstalled, says interior designer Max Buston, who suggests using narrower planks for a historic feel. 

Guinness avoids the heavier pieces of furniture — the elaborate mahogany sideboards with heavy scrolling and inlaid swags, for example — but she loves bobbin chairs and the striped and floral furnishings (Pentreath suggests a trip to antique dealer Puritan Values in London to find great pieces). She recommends giving chairs “a new lease of life with a new fabric” and points to striped fabrics by Hamilton Weston or Ian Mankin — as well as Adam Bray’s brown paper stripe wallpapers. Buston favours the striped fabric and papers of Pierre Frey and Anna French, and pastel paint shades such as Lucca blue by Edward Bulmer. 

For floral wallpaper and fabrics, both Morris & Co and Sanderson are obvious choices, both being founded at the time; according to Claire Vallis, design director of the Sanderson Design Group, patterns from the early 1900s such as Lerena, a quintessential Edwardian pattern by Voysey, and Rose and Peony, are top sellers.

Even without the croquet parties and cream teas of the “long Edwardian afternoon”, it’s an aesthetic filled with languor and joy, says Campbell. 

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“To me, the facade of a building is like the first sentence of a novel — it sets the tone, the mood, and hints at what’s to come,” says German architect Alexis Dornier of Alexis Dornier Makings. 

When designing a house, the primary consideration is most often how the owners will live and occupy the space inside. But for many architects, the front elevation is also a compelling plane for experimentation. Increasingly they are using it not just as a decorative flourish, a charismatic facade for those looking in, but also to raise the bar for personalised design, and to tackle some of the practical and climate-related challenges of our times in new ways.

For Flow House, a project in Bali, Dornier responded to the musician client’s request for a “calm” property by creating an undulating architectural facade that mimicked the shape of a sound wave. The vast curving glass front is met by a sharply dipping, parabolic roof. The curves of the wood-clad ceiling it creates inside improve the acoustics of the home, which is now used as a base for artists’ residencies and includes a recording studio. 

While constructed mostly from concrete, the architect wanted the residents to feel like they were connected with their surroundings. Swaths of glass provide panoramic views of the rural setting, the master bedroom has its own private garden with an outdoor shower, and the first-floor mezzanine swoops down to meet a conically shaped staircase, almost flowing to the pool below and the rice paddies beyond. It is part of the Pennjiwann community near Ubud, a small group of homes blending “minimalistic avant-garde” and “classic Balinese” style.

While Flow House is situated among fields and coconut trees — an open space where its possible to set the architectural tone — the rippling Canvas House in Toronto, Canada, sits between the large early-20th-century Georgian and French Colonial-style homes of the Forest Hill neighbourhood. Completed in 2022, the result enlivens a residential street in an area where the people are “open to architectural dialogue and evolution”, says its creator Alex Josephson, co-founder of architectural studio Partisans. “This house acts as both foil and focal point, balancing boldness with contextual sensitivity.”

The client, an art collector with a background in theatre production, “desired a home as a personal expression”, says Josephson, so he took inspiration from American abstract artist Larry Poons’s dot paintings when creating the masonry pattern. Meanwhile, the “rhythmic facade”, as the architect describes it, is a randomised pattern “arranged like the motions of a theatre drape”. Inside, in contrast, the smooth, clean white interiors serve as a simple background for the client’s collection. The resulting home mimics the size of the detached houses beside it, and similarly keeps the suburban lawn and driveway — but with its single window, and wrapped with a rounded and bulging pixelated pattern of bricks, it seems like an alien among them.

Other projects that boldly juxtapose with their surroundings include Atelier Itch’s 2024 Bomun House, a shining monolith among the crowded dark brick buildings of a narrow Seoul alleyway. Corrugated, lightweight steel wraps around the narrow, four-storey home’s external, road-facing staircase, creating a clean and commanding exterior. The facade appears windowless but lets light in while providing privacy, and extends upwards to fence the rooftop terrace.

Maison KN by Nghia Architect, meanwhile, is a tall red structure characterised by a patchwork of solid and barred squares in the historic centre of Hanoi, Vietnam. Built for two siblings and completed in 2023, it was designed so that it could later be reconfigured to accommodate their two separate families. Extending over seven floors, the facade also extends to act as both a ground-floor courtyard and a third-floor garden, providing ventilation but also ensuring privacy in the crowded neighbourhood. “We were initially keen to dial down the boldness of the exterior,” say the owners, but “the architects’ vision of the house being a ‘sculpture’ stood out.”

Such new buildings can spark an interesting dialogue with the surrounding architecture. State of Kin’s Brick House, in the Mount Lawley suburb of Perth, Australia, was built in 2019 from red bricks salvaged from historic Federation-style homes that had been demolished nearby. This reuse of local material was an attempt to respect both heritage and sustainability. “We see it as a conversation with its surroundings and the residents,” says Ara Salomone, director of architecture at State of Kin. 

While constructed from traditional materials, with a classically shaped pediment above the driveway, the rest is a joyful jumble of shapes, with both square and porthole-like round windows, and a jagged, sawtooth roof that references traditional factory buildings. The playful spirit continues inside with a net hammock suspended over the living space. “It doesn’t shy away from being bold, but it’s also deeply rooted in place,” says Salomone. 

“The use of reclaimed red brick allowed us to craft an exterior that’s richly textured and layered, one that [plays with] light, shadow and time,” adds Salomone, who created interiors that also feature exposed brick throughout, including a cellar with a herringbone ceiling. “Every curve and angle was carefully considered to create rhythm and depth.”

With a similar nod to local history, “facadism” sees the architecturally notable street-facing walls of homes preserved, while the building behind is demolished to make way for a modern construction. But in Bengaluru, India, AJ Architects has played with the practice. Recently tasked with modernising a dated brick and render villa on the busy Mahatma Gandhi Road, they reconfigured the interior and added three dynamic, curved sail-like structures to the exterior, embedded with lights to create a glowing silhouette at night. Constructed from tensile fabric on a tubular steel frame, these decorative elements offered more than a facelift, says founder Arvind Jain. The three structures are “camouflaging the existing structure from the harsh west-facing sun by creating an air gap between the brick walls and the fabric facade, which also helps reduce energy consumption.”

Adapting facades to better cope with climate change is an active preoccupation. Non-structural curtain walls, made from glass or other lightweight materials, can act to protect a building from the elements. Using sensors, kinetic facades can automatically move into place to shield a building as the weather changes. 

In Leiria, Portugal, Didier Fiúza Faustino of Bureau des Mésarchitectures took an imaginative approach to the particular challenge of protecting the residents of the 2024 Martires Housing Complex from the baking sun. “Due to the total area of the site and the urban regulations, the apartments could not have balconies,” says Fiúza Faustino. Instead, the seven flats, located in a semicircular building whose shape mirrors the roundabout beside it, were fitted with vast windows. To combat the heat trap, Fiuza Faustino designed a carapace of golden shutters and sandy precast concrete, coloured to complement the traditional yellow-painted exterior of the adjoining house (the area is under a heritage preservation rule). “By playing with the aluminium shutters, [residents] remain the masters of their home and are able to give their interior space more intimacy,” he says.

“It’s all about using honest, tactile and enduring materials — like brick, timber and steel — not just for their visual qualities, but for the way they age and evolve over time,” says Salomone. 

But as more homeowners engage with their exteriors in dynamic ways, creative alternatives are shaking up the path ahead. Bioplastic 3D-printed curtain walls, sculptural photovoltaic skins and data-responsive surfaces are being developed. Some radical new faces await.

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The ultimate problem for architects is that the most sustainable building is always the one that is already there. There is a huge amount written about green buildings, much of it nonsense. There is some confusion about buildings layered in vines and living walls, stacked high with plant pots, and buildings that actually are green.

Contemporary architecture’s issue is mostly embodied in one material: concrete. Some 8 per cent of all CO₂ emissions are attributable to concrete, the most used material on Earth after water. The rate at which we are still using it is astonishing: half of all the stuff manufactured by weight is concrete. From 2011 to 2013, China used more concrete than the US had in the whole of the 20th century. The construction industry has become helplessly addicted to the protean grey sludge that can be so easily formed into almost anything.

There are signs, however, that architects are beginning to shake things up.

The first credible alternative is, perhaps a little ironically, that oldest of building materials, timber. The pioneering use in Austria in the 1990s of cross-laminated timber (CLT), in which layers of lumber are built up, their grains running in opposing directions, into a very tough laminate, led to a new sustainable direction.

Some 8 per cent of all CO₂ emissions are attributable to concrete, the most used material on Earth after water

The flexibility of CLT has led to the “tall timber” movement and “plyscrapers” — towers constructed entirely of wood. There has had to be some significant adjusting of fire regulations for the new wonder-material (long avoided in high-rise situations precisely because of its flammability), but the problems are being overcome.

One of the first significant CLT buildings was a research centre into the material itself, the Bautechnikzentrum (building technology centre) at Graz University of Technology in Austria (2001), an impressive, industrial-scale structure.

Subsequently, British architectural practice Waugh Thistleton has been a pioneer in the field with its nine-storey Murray Grove housing block in Hackney, east London, in 2009. More recently, its Black & White Building in nearby Shoreditch (2023) is an unusual mass timber office building, with everything from floors to facade in wood, with an intimate, warm feel throughout — a building that performs as well as any other, but far more sustainably.

For an even more extreme example you might look to Hermann Kaufmann’s 2013 IZM building, perched over a lake for a hydroelectric dam in Vandans, western Austria, an elegant wooden structure both sustainable and beautiful.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has been working in wood for decades but also employs the even more sustainable, fast-growing bamboo in his buildings (his Blue Ocean Dome at the Osaka Expo 2025 is impressive). He has also employed his characteristic cardboard tubes for emergency shelters at disaster sites around the world.

Wood has become popular in part because it is familiar and obviously sustainable but also because of a kind of sleight of hand. The capacity of trees to absorb carbon during their lifetimes gives timber buildings a head start, in theory at least, beginning with a negative carbon count.

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Another familiar material making a return to the sustainable arena is stone. You might think it never went away, with big, self-declared sustainable blockbusters such as Foster + Partners’ Bloomberg Building in the City of London being clad extensively and extravagantly in the material. Stone used to be employed as both structure and finish but today is more likely to be applied as a veneer of cladding over steel and concrete.

Architects have more recently been questioning this approach and returning instead to stone as a structural material, cutting out the other, far less sustainable materials.

In Mallorca, where stone is a genuinely local material, architects have been attempting to revive disused quarries and revitalise local material supply chains to create extremely fine new social housing.

One practice, IBAVI, was responsible for a raft of small housing projects, modest but well designed and crafted, and responding to local need on an island where so much construction caters for tourism. Its housing on Salvador Espriu (2022) emulates the vernacular in scale and style using local timber and stone, much as builders would have done centuries ago. The architects have had to redefine local supply chains to get here, stimulating local economies — a long and involved process but one with admirable results.

Rammed earth has also been proving popular recently. Suphasidh Architects’ mixed-use building in Chonburi, Thailand (2024), is a remarkable demonstration of the richness of the material in colour and texture. French architects Déchelette even used it on a Paris apartment block in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt (2024).

Long decried as rural and primitive, compressed earth and mud-brick are being revived as a super-sustainable material (no need for carbon-intensive firing) that bonds the building to its site in a very visual manner, creating a sense of place through material — architectural terroir.

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Yet it remains the case the building that is already there is the most sustainable.

Paris-based architects Lacaton & Vassal, whose motto is “never demolish”, have become known for imaginative and elegant reuse. At the Tour Bois le Prêtre (2011) on the edge of Paris, they took an unpromising social housing slab of a tower and allowed the residents to stay inside during the works, thus maintaining continuity — something so often lost with big construction projects. It reminds us that sustainability ought to apply to communities as well as materials.

It remains the case that the building that is already there is the most sustainable

Rather than demolish, they clad the tower in a layer of extra space, cheaply wrapped in polycarbonate (with sliding sections), to create new terraces, winter gardens and balconies, expanding living space and allowing residents to customise their new areas with greenery. The result is elegant and economical, isolating the apartments while expanding and allowing them to breathe.

We also need to consider Rotor. This unusual practice tends to get a little left out of sustainable architectural discourse because it builds little itself. But what it has achieved is nevertheless remarkable.

Based in Brussels, it began by disassembling buildings about to be demolished or refurbished, salvaging what was reusable, from doors to marble tiles and bathroom fittings and, in a perfectly circular manner, sold these on to architects who wanted a little more texture and character inserted into their buildings.

The practice has also undertaken extensive studies of waste in the industry and defined strategies for reuse and repair. Its Brussels warehouse is a truly remarkable place, rammed with hardware, 1970s bathroom tiles, marble panels and huge glass partitions. A whole, remarkable circular world in itself.

We might not logically associate modernism with Catholicism but there was a moment in the early 1960s when the Church found itself suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, in the vanguard. Among the radical changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was a rethinking of how the physical church should be arranged. The priest was to face the people and the altar was brought into the body of the building; what had once been a profoundly hierarchical space was made accessible, and the congregation found itself at the centre of the mass rather than just on the receiving end.

This coincided with a period of urban revival, a recovery from wartime privations and, in the UK, an explosion in numbers of Catholics that was engendered by fast-growing families and by immigration — from Ireland, Italy and beyond. This sudden proliferation of Catholic churches, which were mostly modern in style, often striking and occasionally astonishing, forms the subject of Here We Are, a new film by artist Elizabeth Price showing at the Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary art. 

I visit Price at her south-east London studio, where she greets me wearing a chic brown boiler suit and makes a few excuses about the broken, gaffer-taped chairs we sit on. Otherwise, it’s all pretty neat for a studio. Most of her work takes place at a desktop with two big screens. Price appears extremely modest and, for an artist who won the Turner Prize (in 2012), is still oddly unsung. Her winning entry was “The Woolworths Choir of 1979”, a haunting video work that mixed music and tragedy: images of a deadly fire in a Woolworths store in Manchester that killed 10 people; grainy film of 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las doing their synchronised song-and-dance routines; people singing in church. The barely perceptible thing that subtly connected all three was a kind of twist of the wrist, a little hand motion that provides a kinetic thread through the seemingly disparate moving images.

In her work for Liverpool, the church is very much back, but this time the thread is postwar architecture rather than that delicate wrist-flick. What, I ask, inspired this particular work? “It was triggered by a visit to St Bride’s Church in East Kilbride,” she says, “this incredible church by [architects] Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. You feel how the building folds you into it and inside, like you’re at the bottom of a well.” 

The church, a blocky brick monument, embraced elements of Scottish castles, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, brutalism and Swedish modernism, and was among the fiercest expressions of the new spirit in Catholic architecture. It is characteristic of the revered (but also perhaps still underrated) architects, who also designed St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, one of the era’s most influential ruins: a dark, charged space now riddled with graffiti and the paraphernalia of headbangers, satanists and junkies. But St Bride’s is still an active church and a place of community. “It’s in my own background,” Price says. “I’m originally from an Irish Catholic family, and religion had a very profound impact on me.” She adds that she is no longer a practising Catholic.

“I thought a lot about the relationship between modernism and Catholicism,” she says, “and they don’t quite map on to each other. There are these incongruities between modernism and conservatism and the role, the subservience of women. This was about finding a niche which gives you a purchase point to start picking away at these inconsistencies, about the way Catholicism and modernism were able to reveal things about each other.”

Price was born in Yorkshire in the north of England but grew up in Luton, just north of London. “Our church was a bit art deco,” she says, “not that much to look at. But as a child I remember being bored in mass and you begin to play in your mind with the sculpted images, the sounds, the music. It becomes a whole imaginative realm, part of the seduction of religion, part of your education. And the images are hugely important.”

She might have been inspired by the stark power of St Bride’s but as she scrolls through a rough early cut of the film on her screens, the first few churches (a mix of historic photos from the Royal Institute of British Architects’ collection and others newly commissioned from Andrew Lee) are modest affairs, ordinary architecture.

“They’re very much embedded in their communities — a part of them,” she says. The boxy 1960s churches look nothing if not suburban. “As I was going round photographing the churches I realised I understood it all,” she says. “I spoke Catholic, I knew what all the bits of churches were called. It was familiar. I have a fascination for the gothic but also those threads of goth that run through modernism. It looks simple but it has these complicated memories running through it . . . both a joyful togetherness and something darker and more mysterious.”

More than a thousand Catholic churches were built in Britain between 1955 and 1975. As the film progresses, the architecture becomes starker, more expressive. The buildings evolve from the cheery suburban modern to a more monumental, moody feel. The images too are dark, beginning as negatives and moving through to positive and then colour-restored, which gives the film an eerie, dreamlike quality. Providing a kind of happy ending is HS Goodhart-Rendel’s Most Holy Trinity in Bermondsey (1957-60), south London, which looks as if it belongs to another age, exuding a dark expressionism.

Likely to be particularly resonant at the biennial are the churches of FX Velarde, a Liverpool local who built eccentric hybrids of Gothic, Romanesque, modernism and art deco. Liverpool has its own Catholic landmark, of course: the great cathedral with its crown of thorns, designed by Frederick Gibberd, which was last week listed at Grade I, the highest form of protection. I ask if it too is included, but Price tells me she concentrated on parish churches, situated in communities.

“There are always other things going on in these churches,” Price says. “There are the legible histories of migration, postwar reconstruction, often traumatised or homesick communities. In this country this is a church of immigrants. They are places where poorer migrants can say ‘Here we are.’ They are about more than Catholicism.”

To September 14, biennial.com

As the clay-plaster walls of architect Josh Piddock’s north London apartment were drying, he decided to inspect the finish. Captivated by its tactility, he could not resist touching the “sandcastle”-like surface. The deep fingerprint he left behind doesn’t bother Piddock. It only adds, he says, to the perfectly imperfect appeal of his interior; the natural tones and textures a gentle nod to the golden London stock brick of the 1920s home. 

Usually associated with traditional rural buildings, clay plaster — a mix of sand, natural fibres and earth — is a niche finish sold by just a handful of suppliers in the UK. But as architects and designers rediscover the ecological — and aesthetic — perks of homegrown earth-based materials, perceptions are shifting. It is now a high-end choice for apartments, town houses or swish new-builds.  

When Cornwall-based Adam Weismann founded specialist supplier Clayworks in 2010, he encountered scepticism. “Ironically, it can feel too natural for some people. They were worried it might fall off the wall. Part of our job was to educate.” His mission paid off. More than a decade and a half later, “now architects come to us,” says Weismann, who has travelled to countries including Japan and Morocco to study indigenous earth techniques, and co-authored two books on the subject with his wife Katy Bryce.

Today, clay is not a cheap alternative to off-the-shelf surface applications like paint or gypsum plaster. (Paint ranges from £9 to £18 per square metre, compared with £23 for clay). But there are benefits beyond its good looks: it is permeable and porous, and its hygroscopic (moisture-absorbing) qualities help to regulate humidity (just avoid using it in bathrooms). It is recyclable, repairable and good for acoustics, softening reverberations. Clay also does not have the environmental impact of concrete (4-8 per cent of annual global CO₂ emissions), as the manufacturing process requires relatively little energy or water, and does not produce any waste.

Architect Alastair Bowden, of McLean Quinlan, lined the internal courtyard of a rural Devon new-build in clay with soft, light-reflecting tones. Bowden likes its lo-fi appeal: “Clay has so many inherent qualities which don’t rely on machinery,” he says. Meanwhile, Pensaer architects’ recent extension to a Victorian Dulwich home makes extensive use of peachy-pink clay, both internally and externally. In the Netherlands, ribbed clay arches frame the doors of an experimental thatch-clad country home by architects Liminal Office. For a south London house, architect Alexis Germanos, of 23 Architecture, created a clay-swathed, swirling staircase.

Clay can be matt, polished, waxed, carved with motifs or sprinkled with shards of china for a terrazzo effect. Combined with mica, it has a glinting finish — as illustrated by the monastic 100 Acre Wood, a loch-side house in Scotland by Denizen Works. Coloured with natural pigments, tones range from subdued ochres and burnt siennas to rich blues or plums. At Clayworks, the choice has expanded to 400 made-to-order hues.

Piddock uses his apartment to trial techniques before presenting them to clients of his architectural practice Studio Merlin. A clay sun motif has been applied to clotted-cream walls in the kitchen, as well as a Mondrian-like grid of burnt orange, parchment and dove-grey tones.

You can see the maker’s marks; the push and pull as he manipulated the material

Most people enlist a skilled artisan to apply the finish. This is part of its appeal, says architect Simon Astridge. He watched specialist Guy Valentine’s “hands-on, embodied” technique with fascination. “You can see the maker’s marks; the push and pull as he manipulated the material,” says Astridge. “And the uneven surface makes the light bounce across the room beautifully.”

For Astridge, who suffers from asthma, clay has therapeutic properties. Like houseplants, it absorbs pollutants: “It’s like having a Dyson purifier embedded in your walls,” he says. 

Most of us are familiar with circular fashion; the same needs to happen in the construction sector, says architect Ken De Cooman. His practice, Brussels-based BC Architects & Studies, collaborates with local developers and government bodies to upcycle soil excavated from building sites and infrastructure works, which in Belgium amounts to around 37mn tonnes annually, some 40 per cent of which is not polluted. De Cooman’s sister company, BC Materials, recycles some of that into plasters, earth bricks and paints. Its output is growing, from 50 tonnes of products in 2019 to 3,300 tonnes last year.

De Cooman, whose clients include Hermès, learnt how to use these materials in Burundi, east Africa, where he worked, pro bono, on a library for locals. His practice now offers training to a new generation of “curious” architects. 

“Clay is an ancient medium, but it has so many possibilities,” says architect Jonathan Tuckey, who has collaborated with De Cooman on the renovation of a 19th-century tannery in Belgium. “The more people [who] use it, the better.”

After a year living in Zimbabwe, Tuckey became fascinated by its indigenous earth architecture. “The decoration was done annually, in patterns or intricate geometries. Each one expressed the [personality of its] owner,” he says. “I wasn’t just captivated by the energy and creativity, but by the way they made use of available materials — be it stones from the river or charred soil.”

Tuckey recently completed a house in Wiltshire using local earth, with clay walls in ochres and soft greens inside. In the turret-like staircase the light is filtered through niches over carved oak stairs. “The atmosphere is extraordinary, even the air feels soft. It’s immersive, as if you’re wrapped in clay,” he says. “There’s an elemental beauty; although it’s a new building it has an atmosphere of permanence . . . As if it’s always been there.”

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