Author: business

The Brutalist begins in darkness; a chaotic, crowded space of stress and strange sounds, the hold of a ship. It’s an origin story for László Tóth, a Jewish-Hungarian architect, newly arrived in America in 1947, whose subsequent work will be characterised by an obsession with darkness and light, confinement and release, defined by trauma. 

You might ask whether this is the best experience to subject his subsequent building’s users to. But then, you never actually see any of the users of his buildings. The movie skips from the construction site to a belated recognition of his brilliance, decades later, at a Venice Biennale of Architecture. Even his first US work, a home library for his wealthy benefactor-to-be, is never seen being used, only displayed. 

Despite its undoubted, epic brilliance, Brady Corbet’s film falls into the trap of the clichéd portrayal of the architect as tortured male genius, working in solitude. The screen architect’s career is defined by struggle, a desire for complete control, a battle to defend the purity and perfection of his vision and a refusal to compromise. It’s intriguing that the movies, which use architecture and space so magically, get it so wrong. 

There is an Ariadne’s thread running from the labyrinthine spaces beneath the hilltop community centre that forms the obsessive centrepiece of The Brutalist right back through to that most unintentionally hilarious of all architectural films, King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949). An extrapolation of Ayn Rand’s dreadful, but insanely influential, paean to the individual over the collective (which titans of finance and tech so adore), the movie manages to be sillier than the book. At one point in both films, the pigheaded architect protagonist quits design for the horny-handed construction site rather than see his dream despoiled by wealthy philistines. The real villain, incidentally, of The Fountainhead, is the architecture critic.

The building in The Brutalist is a community centre. The community is, of course, not involved (though we do see Tóth presenting his model). The building in The Fountainhead is a corporate office tower. Here the workers are not involved — or even considered. These are architects as visionaries whose work we must take as so brilliant that it cannot be questioned or interfered with. It is an almost insane simplification of architecture which understands any concessions to the user as a compromise. Certainly there are architects like this, the solo virtuosos, the creators. It’s an image deeply ingrained in culture, but it needs to be expunged. Architecture is a collective venture.

It is perhaps even more bizarre in the case of The Brutalist, in which we learn that the rooms planned for the community are based on painful memories from Tóth’s past. This then is a “serious”, existential building, one concerned with life and death, darkness and light, suffering and redemption. Fine, perhaps, for a memorial or a crematorium chapel, less so, perhaps, for a community space, gym and library. 

For most of Hollywood history the profession of architecture appears only to indicate a solid, bourgeois dependability. Think Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, Liam Neeson in Love Actually or Henry Fonda, the decent architect juror who stands alone against injustice in 12 Angry Men. But occasionally the profession pops up as an analogue of a kind of capacity for brooding creative intensity and even second sight. In Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now it is not accidental that Donald Sutherland’s grieving architect is involved in the endless struggle against the entropy of Venice’s churches and somehow foresees the tragedy of his daughter’s — and his own — demise.

The problem usually arises when architecture appears at the heart of a movie. Perhaps the movie director, trying to get the perfect film made without interference from the studios and the money men, inevitably identifies with the lone (male) hero. This was the impression you might have received from last year’s Megalopolis, in which Adam Driver’s pompous architect Cesar Catilina seems a cipher for director Francis Ford Coppola’s own dream of total control. This architect seems to have developed a technique for stopping time, and what he does with it is a party trick to catch himself from falling off a skyscraper. That’s it. Incidentally, when we do see Catilina’s city plan, it is ridiculous, an incoherent student fantasy, almost unimaginably bad. As is the movie.

None of these films show the reality of architecture, which is inevitably contingent; it is about working with existing realities, acknowledging the world as it is and its imperfections. It is about accommodating people; users and clients, neighbours and authorities. Tóth’s niece, Zsófia, mute at the start of the film but vocal at its end, sums up her uncle’s dedication by saying, in a speech: “No matter what the others try to sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

The most haunting space in Tóth’s fictional building appears as a kind of sinister, cavernous cistern. Initially we see the architect sketching a space in charcoal characterised by a grid of columns. In the movie we see it mostly as an uncompleted volume, flooded and illuminated by torchlight. To me it evoked the climax of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and its “room” with an undulating floor of what appears to be salt contained by pillars of massive industrial concrete. This is a place where wishes might be granted, or it might be a collective hallucination or dream. 

Once experienced (in the movie or by the viewer), Tarkovsky’s room cannot be forgotten. It creates its own afterlife. In one of Tóth’s lines, architecture is about the creation of something that outlives the individual. “My buildings were designed to endure such erosion,” he says. In fact, architecture is highly vulnerable to changes in use and fashion; it seems permanent but it is not. Just look at the ashes of the modernist villas of LA. The irony perhaps is that the movies, with their impermanent constructions and powerful image-making, often preserve space better than does reality.

No one chronicles love quite like Dolly Parton.

From the melancholy farewell that grounds “I Will Always Love You” to the dizziness of heartbreak laid bare in “The Grass is Blue,” Parton has cemented her place as one of the premier balladeers of the American songbook. But woven into many of those anthems was her real-life love, Carl Dean, an asphalt paver and her loyal cheerleader who died Monday at 82.

For a woman known by her words, Parton stayed fairly mum on Dean throughout their near 60-year marriage. That he rarely made any public appearances only grew the mystique around him.

“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” she wrote in a post announcing his death across her social media channels. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”

Here’s what else Parton has said about Dean over the years, including the comments she made just months before his death.

‘Words can’t do justice’: Dolly Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, dead at 82

How Dolly Parton, Carl Dean met

Parton met Dean when she was 18 years old, shortly after moving to Nashville to pursue her music career. He spotted her while she was leaving the Wishy Washy Laundromat, and the rest is history.

“We did start talking and he did go back in the laundromat with me,” Parton said in a 1977 appearance on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”

“Anyway, we met at the Wishy Washy and in all honesty it’s been wishy washy ever since,” she said.

“If I had it to do all over, I’d do it all over again,” Parton wrote in a statement for their 50th anniversary.

Dolly Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, inspired her hit song ‘Jolene’

Parton on why Dean shied away from the spotlight

After attending an awards show in 1966, Parton recalled that Dean said, “I love you, and I will support you in your career any way I can, but I am not going to any more of these wingdings.”

Since then he has been a supporting character to her main act.

“He never wanted to be part of any of that, never did interviews. (He) would just run like a scalded dog. If somebody said, ‘Are you Carl Dean? Can you answer a few questions?’ ‘No, I don’t answer questions,’” the singer told Knox News, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s ‘normal’ life together

“On weekends my husband and I always have pancakes or waffles,” Parton told USA TODAY in 2024 of her and Dean’s breakfast ritual, “All those things are comfort foods to me … How much comfort you want is how much of it you eat.”

That image, of a normal couple sharing Sunday brunch together, is indicative of how Parton portrayed her and Dean’s lasting bond.

The Essentials: Dolly Parton spills on Cowboys cheerleader outfit, her iconic look: ‘A lot of maintenance’

“There’s always that safety, that security, that strength,” she told Knox News in 2024. “He’s a good man, and we’ve had a good life and he’s been a good husband.”

And just like any couple, despite the glitz and glam of Parton’s stage life, she planned to put it all aside if Dean “needed” her.

“I would only retire if I was ill or if my husband was ill and needed me,” Parton told USA TODAY in 2024. “That’d be the only thing that would make me pull back.”

How Parton, Dean cultivated a lasting love

Parton, who has become an elder stateswoman of country and pop, has advised that her long-lasting relationship worked because of shared humor and space from one another.

She spoke candidly about her marriage to Dean in comments released three months before his death.

“He’s quiet and I’m loud, and we’re funny,” Parton said of Dean in the December episode of Bunnie Xo’s “Dumb Blonde” podcast. “I think one of the things that’s made it last so long through the years is that we love each other (and) we respect each other, but we have a lot of fun.

“Anytime (there’s) too much tension going on, either one of us can like, find a joke about it to really break the tension,” she continued. “We never fought back and forth. And I’m glad now that we never did, because once you start that, that becomes a lifetime thing.”

That humor was on full display in 2021 when Parton dressed up as a Playboy Bunny for Dean’s birthday. “I was trying to think of something to do to make him happy,” she said in a video posted to social media. “He still thinks I’m a hot chick after 57 years and I’m not going to try and talk him out of that. And I hope he agrees. What do you think?” 

Parton also attributes her successful marriage to some healthy space from one another.

“I stay gone … and there’s a lot of truth in that − the fact that we’re not in each other’s faces all the time,” she joked in a 2020 interview with Entertainment Tonight.

I live in a Grade II-listed house in a historically important, but somewhat down-at-heel town on the UK’s east coast. I love it; it has sash windows, a little cast-iron boot scraper set into the wall next to the front door, and someone’s name scratched on to the rear window in a 19th-century cursive. But it is hard to keep warm, and when we first moved in the roof leaked. Living in a heritage property means a responsibility to look after a piece of architectural history. But it’s a privilege that occasionally feels like a Kafka-esque nightmare. 

We had to apply for permission to overhaul our leaky roof. The local heritage officer initially suggested that repairs would not be permitted, as our home would no longer be in keeping with the rest of the terrace: presumably because it would not be leaking. Thankfully, the local planning officer overruled, seeing that repairs would help keep the house standing. 

Today, as the country’s housing, energy and climate crises reshape the way we inhabit and think about properties, the question of how to manage the country’s historic buildings is more complex than ever. What does conservation mean in a matrix of crises? And how do we balance responsibility for the past with the needs of the future? 

Britain has the oldest housing stock in Europe. In England alone, around 20 per cent of all housing was built before 1919, and more than 400,000 buildings are on a protected conservation list due to their architectural and historical significance. While housing on this list makes up only about 2 per cent of the country’s housing stock, 2.8mn homes are within conservation areas with a separate, additional set of rules for how to look after them. For many, it can be very hard to make — often urgently needed — changes to your home. 

And they are needed. A 2020 survey by Tado found that a UK home with an indoor temperature of 20C and an outside temperature of 0C, loses on average 3C after five hours, three times more than the average German home. Continued reliance on gas boilers not only makes homeowners particularly sensitive to price spikes or supply interruptions, but makes meeting the UK’s 2050 net zero climate targets incredibly challenging. 

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The system of “listing” buildings in the UK was started by the government during the second world war, so that churches and other important, mostly pre-1750, buildings could be monitored for damage. The list was drawn up by 300 architects. In 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act gave statutory power to the list. The late 1960s saw its first survey completed, and then another in the 1980s. Today, government body Historic England’s listed buildings can be Grade II, II* or I, with Grade I designating a building “of exceptional interest”. Inclusions range from landmarks such as Tower Bridge to a 19th-century urinal in Westminster. 

But beyond these more systematic efforts, the expansion and management of what counts as a heritage building has been more piecemeal. In 2019, Historic England published a report by Matthew Saunders, former secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, who had been commissioned to review the system. He acknowledged the “vital role of listing in protecting this country’s architectural heritage” but described the uneven coverage and detail in the listings in terms of geography, architectural style and time period. “Examples of the deficiencies are legion,” he wrote. 

So what purpose does listing serve today? And who decides whether a building should be protected? And what does “protected” mean?

Ian Morrison, the director of policy and evidence at Historic England, emphasises that the body is not about preservation but conservation: “It is about making sure we manage change sensitively.” The body makes decisions about which buildings are added to the list. But the final decision lies with the secretary of state. A common misconception is that Historic England approves or denies applications for improvements or repairs; this is in the hands of local planning authorities: bodies that are increasingly under-resourced. 

The risk is that buildings fall into a state of disrepair and they then need even more work doing to them . . . [but] if we don’t do this work, people won’t be able to live in these buildings

Historic England’s own survey of local authorities in a 2024 report reveals the extent of the resourcing crisis: between 2006 and 2018 the number of archaeologists and conservation specialists working for local authorities decreased by 35 per cent and the spending on heritage-related development control by 57 per cent. 

While for some, owning a listed building can seem like a nightmare of bureaucracy and expense, for others it carries a cultural cachet. There is a healthy market for architecturally important and historical houses, although in most cases both purchase and maintenance come with a premium. Academic and architecture critic Matthew Lloyd Roberts described the dilemma as simply a question of “How much money are you going to spend to improve the comfort and retain the aesthetics of your listed house?”

“Having a listed status doesn’t put buyers off,” argues Georgia Grunfeld, acting head of appraisals for specialist estate agencies The Modern House and Inigo. Opportunities for sensitive renovations can be a selling point: “These houses are often appreciated for lower carbon footprint repairs too,” says Grunfeld. “Vernacular building materials, like traditional lime render and paint, wool insulation etc, can often be sourced in surprising proximity.” 

In the context of both the climate and housing crises, there are some bigger questions to ask about the importance of building conservation. While the number of listed houses is relatively small, it draws attention to the wider value of reusing and adapting existing buildings.

The best way to conserve historic buildings is to adapt them and keep them in use, says Rachael Owens from the National Retrofit Hub: “The risk is that buildings fall into a state of disrepair and they then need even more work doing to them . . .[but] if we don’t do this work, people won’t be able to live in these buildings.” Most listed houses are maintained by their occupiers rather than heritage bodies: Morrison says that Historic England is trying to avoid “an environment whereby it is too difficult for people, then historic buildings become less attractive. Obsolescence is the thing we need to avoid the most.”

In February last year, 59 per cent of local authorities told Historic England they were seeing an increase in retrofit casework relating to historic buildings in the past year. In a separate survey, more than half of people living in historic buildings told Historic England they were planning a project to adapt their home to improve energy efficiency in the future. Historic England has provided the public with resources intended to make this process easier on the Your Home section of its website. It makes the case that if “properly designed and maintained”, heritage buildings can provide better energy efficiency than many would expect, because they are “designed to work with their environment”. 

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There is much innovative work being done to adapt historic buildings for the present day. Two of the winners of Architects’ Journal’s 2024 Retrofit & Reuse Awards stand out. Led by specialist firm SPASE Design, Grade I-listed Athelhampton House was turned from a leaky kerosene and oil-fuelled stately home into a building with zero energy bills. Sensitively integrated breathable insulation in the floors and ceilings helped, but most was achieved through the installation of air-source heat pumps, solar panel arrays and battery storage. Of course, this is only possible if you have the land and capital to accommodate this scale of renewable energy generation — and the ancient yew hedges to hide it all behind. 

The Old Chapel presents a very different approach. Here Tuckey Design Studio recycled materials from the site and elsewhere including reclaimed timber and terracotta tiles to reduce waste and opened up the building to promote circulation and natural ventilation. It encapsulates a “fascinating dialogue between old and new, maintaining the rich patina and history of a place in preparation for a new purpose,” says project lead Elena Aleksandrov. But again, these kinds of projects are not always an option for many people’s budgets. 

Historic England says it wants to remove some of the additional fear and cost about modernising. In 2024 it released an advice note setting out best practice for the adaptation of historic homes, designed to support local authorities in making decisions that balance heritage and environmental impact. 

And historic buildings do not need to be handled with kid gloves, says Anna Hollyman, co-head of the Regenerative Places Programme at the UK Green Buildings Council (UKGBC). Those that survive tend to be robust. “Because of this they can be moulded and remoulded: basically the epitome of ‘long life loose fit’”. The phrase comes from a prescient speech made by Alex Gordon, then president of RIBA, in 1972. He proposed that good architecture is designed to be later adapted. This important principle today is encouraged by bodies such as UKGBC, which advocates for conserving and adapting buildings to prevent unnecessary damage to the environment.

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Saunders writes in his 2019 report that “historic buildings and monuments . . . do as much to define this country as its democracy and language”. But which buildings are deemed architecturally significant enough to be worth protecting is as contentious an issue as how they are protected. 

Social housing has been a flashpoint for debates about the listing system in recent decades, says architecture critic Owen Hatherley. Take the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, a Modernist building that became Grade II*-listed in 1998. A rare modern addition to the list, the development was completed in 1961 and is an internationally important example of the “streets-in-the-sky” style of architecture, with wide decks connecting flats at the upper levels. But despite the high level of protection afforded by the listing, the local planning authority approved plans that included the gutting of three flanks of the building for transformation into luxury apartments. 

For Hatherley this plan meant “almost destroying the entire building — as if it were only the frame that was listed”. Historic England thinks differently, and holds up the Park Hill site as an exemplar project. “From our perspective, the buildings have been successfully repurposed without losing their primary architectural significance,” says Morrison. 

The Twentieth Century Society argues that the listing criteria is not fit for purpose, because it favours older buildings over more recent ones: the government’s guidance on selection states that buildings less than 30 years old “are not normally considered to be of special architectural or historic interest because they have yet to stand the test of time”.

“One big flaw in the current system is that there is no mechanism for looking at the buildings ‘coming of age’ each year,” says the society’s director Catherine Croft. According to her, the majority of cases in which a recommendation to list is overruled by the secretary of state are for postwar buildings, and these decisions are often “influenced by lobbying from owners and swayed by arguments which go beyond . . . architectural and historic value” — factors such as cost of redevelopment or local regeneration.

Hatherley critiques society’s broader approach to old buildings. The work at Park Hill, and the renovation of other notable social housing blocks, such as Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, may preserve the building’s physical form, but they do not conserve their original purpose of providing housing for low-income families. Hatherley argues that if there were a choice between maintaining the use of a housing estate and protecting its architectural value, he would err towards the former: “At least it is doing this thing that we as a society need. But instead, it is decided that we need architectural trinkets.”

Within the heritage list there are curious inclusions that hint towards conservation that surpasses architectural value: Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s childhood homes, for example. McCartney’s is a modest 1949 council house of the quality that the postwar Labour government encouraged; Lennon’s a more middle-class dwelling built in 1933, an example of Arts & Crafts-influenced 1930s housing with lead casement windows. Neither would have been protected by a listing had it not been for their residents, but this good fortune means examples of more “ordinary” housing — arguably every bit as important to our social and architectural history as grand villas and churches — have been conserved. 

The Beatles’ homes are examples of what Leanne Tritton, one of the founders of the campaign group Don’t Waste Buildings, called “journeymen buildings”. The group refocuses the question of conservation to something altogether more fundamental — waste. The thrust of its argument is that if Britain is to meet the 2050 net zero target, it cannot afford to knock down buildings. This is because of embodied carbon; the climate warming emissions that have already been expended in a building’s construction. The UK Green Building Council reports that 20 per cent of the carbon emissions attributed to the built environment in the UK come from embodied carbon.

Should we, therefore, be more stringent with protections? Perhaps not on a basis of architectural merit but of environmental conservation. Demolishing a leaky old house and replacing it with a highly insulated one is not necessarily a net gain for the environment: the carbon emissions that went into the original building’s creation are essentially wasted.

“Historic societies are really good at protecting historic buildings but Don’t Waste Buildings is about the unloved,” says Tritton. “It just makes no sense to pull them down unless you absolutely have to.” The Don’t Waste Buildings campaign presents a new way to approach old buildings which is at once more revolutionary and more pragmatic — it hopes — than the current one.  

When facing down the challenge of updating ageing housing stock, one could be forgiven for seeing the wealth of heritage buildings in Britain as a burden. Or protecting their architecture as an obstacle. But perhaps the answer lies in seeing the historic built environment as a starting point for modernisation: heritage not as holding back the future, but its foundation.

This article has been amended since publication.

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Letter in response to this article:

Britain’s big debt to the built heritage listing system / From Colin Johns, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, UK

Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the Season 1 finale of “Paradise.”

The biggest mystery is finally solved in the Season 1 finale of “Paradise,” Hulu’s post-apocalyptic thriller about the slice of humanity that survived a mass-extinction event in a bunker built by billionaires. We now know who killed President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), an act of violence that started to unravel the delicate balance of power and secrets in the underground town. But knowing isn’t the same as being satisfied. And the finale left us with a lot to be dissatisfied about.

That episode (now streaming) unmasked the killer, resolved a major crisis in the idyllic town and set our hero Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) on a mission to find his lost wife in Season 2. It was a lot, and it didn’t all come together despite a strong and intriguing start. Too bad all that momentum was lost when creator Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”) answered all the questions.

The episode opened with a typical Fogelman flashback scene, as we meet one of the construction workers (Ian Merrigan) who built the Paradise bunker into the side of a Colorado mountain. He’s a standup guy, a manager who cares about his employees, has a big heart and always does the right thing. But when he points out a safety issue that could shut down the project, he’s fired and iced out by the Powers That Be. Soon he becomes obsessed with the bunker, with the requisite conspiracy-theory cork boards. We also learn he’s the man who attempted to assassinate Cal back before the supervolcano apocalyptic event, when Xavier took a bullet for the president. Wonder if that will ever be relevant again.

But then the episode shifts back to the present day, when a desperate Xavier has a gun trained on Samantha, aka Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), even as she has his daughter held hostage and proof that his wife is alive on the surface. She informs him Cal’s killer came from outside the bunker, and demands Xavier finally figure it out or he’ll never see his daughter again. So we’re right back to where the season started.

Robinson (Krys Marshall) and Dr. Torabi (Sarah Shahi) start looking for anomalies in the records of the Paradise residents’ arrivals, while Xavier retraces Cal’s footsteps on his last day. Torabi figures out that amiable diner waitress Maggie (Michelle Meredith) isn’t who she seems to be with some nut-allergy sleuthing. Maggie quickly fesses up to her subterfuge, but says she’s done it all because “he” made her. Who is he, you may ask?

Well, simultaneously, Xavier follows Cal’s path to the Paradise library where he’s knocked out by … Trent the Librarian! Yes, the awkward balding man was behind it all. No, seriously, we discover he’s the construction worker from the montage intro, who escaped prison on the day of the volcano (naturally) and found his way to the bunker, killed a guy he kinda looked like and snuck in with a woman he met a gas station. Once there, he decided to just enjoy his new privileged life until the day Cal walks into the library and reminds him that actually, he hates everyone in Paradise ― and especially Cal, whom he wrongly believes to be the mastermind of the entire Paradise plot. And to cap it off, we’re treated to an unnecessarily graphic flashback of Cal’s murder.

Trent tries to escape (to where? they’re in a closed system), but is eventually cornered by Xavier and Robinson in the rafters of the bunker. He dies by suicide, leaving Cal with a neat little report for Sinatra. But everyone’s favorite billionaire can’t tell Xavier where his daughter is, because she’s lost control of Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), her pet killer. Jane turned against Sinatra over a video game console, of all things, and shows up at the standoff between Sinatra and Xavier just in time to shoot Sinatra in the right spot to keep her alive but incapacitated.

So that’s where we’re left at the end of the season. Jane gets to keep her identity as a sleeper sociopath, Xavier gets to take a plane to the surface to find his wife and the rest of Paradise gets to handily ignore that the very fabric of their society almost collapsed.

It’s all hunky dory and cashew cheese fries going into Season 2. Except that this finale left too many loose ends dangling, solved mysteries incoherently and lost all dramatic propulsion from earlier episodes. It makes it hard to be excited about a second season. Are all the show’s villains going to turn out to be mild-mannered civil servants we’ve barely seen?

That’s not exactly the kind of shock and awe one would expect from a post-apocalyptic thriller. Let’s hope Xavier can save his wife ― and the show ― in a second season.

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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

Among the avalanche of executive actions which spilled forth after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as US president was the return of an idea he’d tried in December 2020 (though it barely lasted a couple of months, and certainly did not lead to any buildings): a memorandum titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Architecture”.

For “beautiful” read “classical”. But for “classical” read what, exactly? Is the US government really going to go all Beaux-Arts? With sculpted friezes and domes, mosaics and Corinthian columns? It’s not cheap, this stuff.

The right loves a little classicism. It always has. It stands in their minds for class and conservatism and drawing a line back to the ancient world. That the Capitol and the White House were built in part by enslaved labour and that Hitler and Mussolini loved a classical column once tainted any hints of classical revivalism. Now that the US government is determined to abandon any hints of “wokeness”, we needn’t really worry about that any more.

Trump’s taste is also a reflection of a much larger trend of what we might call right-wing revivalism. In Budapest, Viktor Orbán is rebuilding the old castle district to its Habsburg pomp, so that it is becoming difficult to tell what is old and what is new. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been Bauhaus-bashing, suggesting modernism “displaced local architectural traditions”. And social media is flooded with memes of classical buildings and white marble sculptures as ciphers for the “purity” and supposed superiority of western culture.

There are bad neoclassical buildings just as there are bad modernist buildings. You cannot make it a stylistic binary: Corinthian columns good, curtain walls bad

Such rhetoric is cultural dog-whistling. As the Oscar-tipped film The Brutalist — starring Adrien Brody as a postwar Hungarian-Jewish émigré architect — points out with such clarity, much of the distaste for modernism is a not-so-veiled attack on its many Jewish and often communist theorists, protagonists and patrons. Those associations have stuck around, incredibly, for a century and modernism is still seen by the right as somehow alien.

Yet America became the default home of modernism, the nation where it achieved its apotheosis. Midtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago or the affluent mid-century houses of southern California are arguably the zenith of modernism, albeit stripped of its early ideology (when the concerns of its often left-leaning architects tended towards social housing and a more egalitarian society). The world went modern not because of the Bauhaus but because US big business adopted and embraced modernism so completely and so seductively.

And that success included, of course, one Donald Trump. The president, who made his name in real estate, was an enthusiastic erector of generic high-rises. You will find no classical porticoes, no sculpted friezes on Trump’s towers. They are all resolutely late-modern, unadorned, shiny extrusions of steel and glass. At least, on the outside.

In his brilliantly waspish book, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), Tom Wolfe wrote: “Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building . . . and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse.”

He might have been writing about Trump, whose own taste in interiors veers towards Versailles. There is this strange disconnect between the predilection for classicism and the gaudy golds and mirrors of dictator-kitsch, and the practicalities of modern construction, geared towards repetitive floor plates and curtain walls.

The right’s position is that federal buildings should be recognisable, grand, and should inspire awe. In fairness, it might be time to introduce a little nuance here. Neo-classicism and the Francophile Beaux-Arts style were the default language of government architecture, right from Antebellum to the early 1950s. And it was, in its way, an apolitical choice. Much of the biggest and best classically inflected architecture dates to the New Deal 1930s, when Franklin D Roosevelt used the construction of vast new government buildings as an employment and training programme, employing stonemasons and carvers, mural artists, sculptors and metalworkers. And a great deal of it is nearly indistinguishable from what the fascists were doing across the Atlantic, even down to the imperial eagles and fasces carved on to the facades and the friezes of heroic workers.

But Trump is not Roosevelt. His is a small-government public realm. What, exactly, is the government proposing to build? Probably mostly data centres to support its $100bn AI programme. Will these be dressed as classical temples?

Certainly you can still build in a classical style. There are a few architects who specialise in it and others who are happy to be chameleons. But it is expensive, time-consuming and it is difficult. And it often arrives with the weird assumption that to be traditional, or classical, or not-modern is enough to make it beautiful. It is not. There are plenty of bad neoclassical buildings just as there are bad modernist buildings. You cannot make it a stylistic binary: Corinthian columns good, curtain walls bad.

When far-right and neo-Nazi groups gather across the US, they often alight on classical buildings as a background, as they did in Charlottesville in 2017 and Nashville, Tennessee, the following year — Grecian temples as symbols of western civilisation. And the images from the assault on the Capitol remain indelibly seared in the collective consciousness. Likewise, Hollywood directors have displayed a penchant for blowing up those classical edifices: the Capitol, the White House, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials.

Classicism represents permanence — and Trump’s garish schtick yearns for something more substantive. But dressing up as Ancient Greece in the age of Trump looks like cosplay.

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Harvey Weinstein is weighing in after two of his children received a mention during the Academy Awards.

Adrien Brody, who is dating Weinstein’s ex-wife Georgina Chapman, gave a shout-out to the kids Weinstein shares with Chapman while accepting the Oscar for best actor on Sunday.

During his acceptance speech honoring his role in “The Brutalist,” Brody thanked “my amazing partner” Chapman, saying she has “not only reinvigorated my own self-worth, but my sense of value and my values.” He also thanked “her beautiful children, Dash and India,” adding, “I know this has been a rollercoaster, but thank you for accepting me into your life, and Popsy’s coming home a winner.”

Weinstein was married to Chapman from 2007 to 2021, and they share two kids: India, 14, and Dashiell, 11. Chapman first announced her split from Weinstein in October 2017 after allegations of sexual abuse against him emerged, saying at the time, “My heart breaks for all the women who have suffered tremendous pain because of these unforgivable actions. I have chosen to leave my husband.”

In reaction to the speech, a representative for Weinstein told USA TODAY, “Harvey is very happy for Georgina and grateful that his children are being cared for (and) loved as they deserve to be.”

Weinstein also shares three children with Eve Chilton, his first wife.

Adrien Brody’s epic Oscar speech breaks record as longest in history

Brody has been linked to Chapman, a fashion designer whose label Marchesa dressed many Oscar attendees during Weinstein’s Hollywood reign, since 2020.

Weinstein, who prior to his criminal convictions was a major player at the Academy Awards and was frequently thanked during acceptance speeches, is currently incarcerated after he was found guilty of rape in Los Angeles in 2022. Separately, Weinstein’s rape conviction in New York was overturned in 2024.

Halle Berry kisses Adrien Brody on Oscars red carpet in viral callback to 2003 scandal

Brody’s Oscar acceptance speech broke a record as the longest in the history of the Academy Awards, clocking it at 5 minutes and 37 seconds. According to Guinness World Records, the previous record was set by Greer Garson, who gave a 5 minute and 30 second speech in 1943 after winning best actress.

On the red carpet at Sunday’s Oscars, Brody shared a kiss with Halle Berry, calling back to the moment he famously kissed her after winning the best actor Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2003. Chapman reacted to the moment in an interview with Extra, saying, “How can you deny a man a kiss with Halle Berry?”

The three-year milestone since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine falls in the depths of winter, when temperatures hover around freezing.

Since that day in February 2022, more than 2mn homes have been damaged by attacks, according to the UN, leaving many with destroyed roofs, shattered windows and a lack of power. Or worse. “For the residents remaining in front-line communities, many of whom are the most vulnerable older people, the repairs of homes are vital,” says Matthias Schmale, UN resident and humanitarian co-ordinator, Ukraine.

While centralised repair and rebuilding efforts have been ongoing — including those by the government, the UN and the EU — independent groups have stepped up.

“We saw the scale of destruction in the villages with our own eyes,” says Ihor Okuniev, a Ukrainian artist who travelled to the deoccupied countryside around Chernihiv and Kyiv in May 2022. “People had nowhere to go; they continued living in partially destroyed houses, with leaking roofs, dampness and mould.” 

Okuniev — together with Vladyslav Sharapa, a construction manager, and florist Kseniia Kalmus — had already been providing humanitarian aid in Kyiv. Their volunteer organisation, Livyj Bereh, was named after the left bank of the Dnipro River, where its efforts began. But seeing the residents of these villages catalysed a focus on supplying free new roofs.

“If the roof is damaged, it’s only a matter of time before the entire structure begins to fall apart,” says Okuniev. To date, Livyj Bereh has rebuilt approximately 400 roofs across Ukraine, working with village councils to identify families in need.

One, the Hlushko family, lives in Slatyne, Kharkiv, just 12 miles from the Russian border. Oleksandr Hlushko has provided “extensive support to fellow villagers” throughout the war, says Kalmus. His 11-year-old daughter Masha cares for the animals abandoned by neighbours forced to flee. The Hlushko home was damaged by heavy shelling in June 2022, and following deoccupation by Russian forces, Livyj Bereh repaired its roof. Now, Oleksandr helps distribute roofing materials in the village.

Livyj Bereh uses sheets of galvanised corrugated metal — “a universal solution that suits most houses”, says Sharapa. It is robust, easily available and relatively affordable. Still, the average cost of each new roof, including labour, is around €2,000. Livyj Bereh is funded solely by charitable donations.

The biggest challenge is finding windows and doors, which suffer most during air raids

Through its restoration work, Livyj Bereh has also been documenting Ukraine’s at-risk vernacular architecture, showcasing it at exhibitions through photography and artefacts. “Due to massive shelling and fighting, many traditional houses — vivid examples of Ukrainian architectural heritage — have been destroyed or marked by significant destruction,” says Okuniev.

After one exhibition in Düsseldorf in 2022, it decided to dismantle the exhibition pavilion and use the materials to construct a new home for a family in Sloboda Kucharska village, working alongside Ukrainian architectural studio MNPL Workshop. In 2023, the story of the house was presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

In November last year, the organisation won the 2024 Royal Academy Dorfman Prize, awarded to “an architect, practice or collective who are reimagining the future of architecture”.

Another organisation driving change is Warsaw-based BRDA, established by Polish charity worker Zofia Jaworowska and Ukrainian architect Petro Vladimirov, which has been co-ordinating the delivery of windows to Ukraine since July 2022. Jaworowska had been helping Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Poland find housing, but she and Vladimirov decided there must be something they could do to help those who stayed in Ukraine — or were returning. 

The duo reached out to NGOs there to find out what was needed. “They specifically said that the biggest challenge is finding windows and doors, which suffer most during air raids,” says Jaworowska.

Funded largely by charitable donations, BRDA began to collect windows from a range of sources — renovated office blocks in Warsaw, homeowners in London — and organised transport to Ukraine. There, volunteers in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions distributed the windows.

BRDA’s “Window” project was showcased at the 2023 London Design Biennale. Here, visitors could see the stories of some of the windows that had been donated, alongside a manual BRDA created to help recipients install them in different situations.

Over the past few years, their process has been streamlined. Now, instead of small numbers of windows coming from scattered sources, BRDA obtains large quantities from single sources, such as developers. “Anywhere where there’s a large building that has windows being replaced, or the whole building is being demolished, that’s our best source,” says Jaworowska. Currently, BRDA is working with a French investor renovating a large housing estate outside Lyon, sending windows from there to Kharkiv and Kherson. As of last month, BRDA has sent 2,658 windows to Ukraine.

Glass has become prohibitively expensive for many in Ukraine. Previously reliant on Russia and Belarus, Ukraine was forced to turn to pricier imports from other European countries after the war began. While donations organised by groups like BRDA help many, the scale of demand is huge. Insulate Ukraine, a charity established by British engineer Harry Blakiston Houston, supports Ukrainian communities by installing new, shatterproof windows using plastic and duct tape — and no glass.

Houston developed the emergency window design as a University of Cambridge PhD candidate; it is touted to be better at insulating than double-glazed windows. Established in December 2022 and supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Deutsche Bank, among others, Insulate Ukraine sources materials and pays local labourers to make and install windows where they are needed. According to Houston, more than 37,000 windows have been installed in Ukraine so far.

According to the UN, in 2024 humanitarian groups supported more than 114,000 people in Ukraine with “light and medium . . . repairs of apartments or houses”.

Restoring a house can only do so much, but it is a first step to survival — and recovery. For Livyj Bereh, the biggest challenge is “seeing people who have suffered because of the war — those who have lost loved ones, their homes and everything they had built or gathered throughout their lives”, says Kalmus. “While homes and material possessions can be restored, lives cannot be brought back.”

Kalmus hopes they are giving people “hope for the future” — whenever that peaceful future might arrive. “Because the biggest dream for all of these people is to stay on their land, in their own homes.”

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From duchess to Dutch oven, Meghan’s new lifestyle show is available for feasting on Netflix.

“With Love, Meghan” debuted eight episodes Tuesday, showcasing the Duchess of Sussex’s love for elevating a moment and whipping up a fresh dish with ingredients from her garden or eggs from hens. The birds live in a house named Archie’s Chick Inn, after Meghan and Prince Harry’s 5-year-old son. They’re also parents to daughter Lilibet, 3.

In the series, Meghan provides glimpses of her personal life. She gently corrects guest Mindy Kaling, who calls the “Suits” actress by her maiden name. “It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle,” the royal notes. “You know I’m Sussex now?”

“Well now I know,” Kaling says, “and I love it.”

Meghan’s Prince Charming appears in the final episode, in which Meghan plans a brunch to celebrate her brand, As Ever. The new venture, slated to launch this spring, is “a collection of products, each inspired by her long-lasting love of cooking, entertaining, and hostessing with ease,” according to its website. Three types of teas, raspberry spread and dried florals dubbed flower sprinkles are among the current offerings.

With just minutes left in the finale, Harry arrives looking California cool in sunglasses and a linen button down. He greets his wife with a kiss and sips a mimosa.

He congratulates Meghan in an intimate moment, gushing about the party, “You did a great job. I love it.”

Meghan addresses her guests, including her mom, Doria Ragland, with a toast.

“This feels like a new chapter that I’m so excited that I get to share, and I’ve been able to learn from all of you,” Meghan says. “So just thank you for the love and support. And here we go. There’s a business!”Meghan also reflects on her former lifestyle blog The Tig, which she shuttered in 2017 after falling for Harry.

“All of that is just part of that creativity that I’ve missed so much,” Meghan adds. “Thank you for loving me so much and celebrating with me!”

Harry, pointing his champagne flute at his wife, toasts, “To you.”

Meghan told People magazine in an interview published Monday that she sees “this spark in (Harry’s) eye when he sees me doing the thing that I was doing when he first met me.

“It’s almost like a honeymoon period again,” she said, “because it’s exactly how it was in the beginning when he’d watch me scribbling away, writing newsletters, fine-tuning edits and just really being in the details of it. I think he loves watching as much as I love doing that creative process.”