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Russian documentarist Victor Kossakovsky has worked on the very largest scales, and some of the smallest. In his intimate mode, he has made a film studying the view from the window of his flat, while 2020’s extraordinary Gunda offered a close-up portrait of a sow and her litter. At the other end of the spectrum was Aquarela (2018), a quasi-symphonic musing on the various manifestations of water on our planet.

Now in similarly maximalist mode comes Architecton, a largely wordless study of stone. This imagistic essay muses on the problem of man-made structures now and through history, and the urgency of rethinking the art of building when there is only so much natural material left to exploit.

Architecton begins by contemplating destruction, using drone photography to provide sweeping vistas of buildings shelled by Russia in Ukraine or destroyed during the Turkish earthquakes of 2023. Then we contemplate the sheer power of substance, in the form of a colossal stone block in the ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon — a mass that one can barely imagine human machineries ever having manipulated.

The film then becomes a rhapsody to pure materiality, as the camera glides over stone surfaces and contemplates endless slow cascades of rock down the slopes of a quarry, and boulders pulverised in the grinding machineries of a gravel crusher. Through the remarkable clarity of Ben Bernhard’s photography — so precise that at one point, your attention is caught by a tiny ant scuttling along a slab of masonry — gazing at the real becomes akin to a hallucinatory science-fiction experience. Sequences in black and white show an abandoned town reclaimed by nature, its surfaces and surrounding vegetation bleached out like bone or chalk.

Interludes in a more everyday register show Italian architect Michele De Lucchi — himself resembling a visitor from antiquity, bearded like an Attic sage — as he supervises the laying of a circle of stones in his garden. In the film’s epilogue, he and Kossakovsky contemplate the problem of architecture now and in the future. How can we build, De Lucchi asks, with material that is not fated to become garbage? What does it mean that humanity once made structures that endured a thousand years but now makes them to last only decades? The architect ruefully confesses his guilt at working on a building to be made from concrete, a material that he regards as “arid”. Indeed, it is through the manufacture of concrete that we have been watching mountains reduced gradually to rubble and dust.

On one level, Architecton is a semi-abstract reverie on a very material topic; with its often ceremonial-sounding music by Evgueni Galperine, it somewhat recalls Godfrey Reggio’s much-loved “state of humanity” documentary Koyaanisqatsi. Certainly there is a slight flavour of the grandiosely sententious — and the opening images of destruction could be accused of aestheticising catastrophe. But there is also a serious philosophical and environmental inquiry at work here, regarding our future and the urgent need to reinvent the way we make the spaces we inhabit.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from January 10

Jennifer Hudson’s latest basketball game outing wasn’t exactly a common one for her.

The “Dreamgirls” star, 43, seemed to have her glasses knocked off after a basketball flew directly at her head while she was sitting courtside at a New York Knicks game on Tuesday with her boyfriend, Common.

The incident occurred after Knicks player Miles McBride attempted to grab the ball, which was knocked forward toward Hudson. Common, who was sitting next to Hudson, reacted quickly and put his hand out in an attempt to block the ball.

It wasn’t totally clear whether the ball made contact with Hudson or whether Common’s hand blocked it in time. But either way, footage from the game showed Hudson looking frazzled in the aftermath of the incident. Common put his arm around her as she examined her glasses, which did not appear to be damaged.

“Protect Jennifer Hudson!” one commentator exclaimed on the broadcast, while another observed that her glasses looked “real expensive.”

Jennifer Hudson gushes about Common and chats with him about marriage: ‘You are my joy’

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Hudson.

Hudson has been spotted at Knicks games with Common before, and she performed at an NBA All-Star game in 2024.

Jennifer Hudson gives update on romance with Common: ‘Everything is wonderful’

Hudson and Common slyly confirmed their relationship in a January 2024 episode of her talk show. In an interview, the rapper revealed he was dating an unnamed woman who has “an EGOT” and won “an Oscar on her first movie,” clearly referring to Hudson. She said that she was “very happy” in her relationship, while not explicitly saying it was with Common, while he said that “this relationship is a happy place for me.”

In October, Common appeared on Hudson’s talk show again and doubled down on a previous statement that “if I should be married, it would be to” her. She replied, “I support that idea. I think it’s a beautiful idea!”

Bahrain’s Pearling Path is not quite like anything I’ve seen before. It is a landmark cultural project in the Gulf that privileges carefulness and thoughtfulness over spectacle. It is a project in which the streetlamps and the benches built for the local community are as beautifully considered as the museums, historic restorations and concert venues. It is, in short, a wonderful surprise. 

Bahrain, a small kingdom on an island between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, has largely eschewed the excesses of Gulf brashness. Its capital Manama is a busy, functional, late-20th-century but slightly shabby city.

Just over a short stretch of water is Muharraq, the nation’s original capital, home to migrant workers and the working classes, and a very different city of tight, shady streets and alleys staggered to encourage breezes and to break up the hot winds. And it is here that the Pearling Path has been established, a winding, 2.2-mile trail through backstreets, alleys and courtyards that ties together some new and some old attractions, designed and restored with care and intelligence, each reflecting on the pearl fishing and trading that was once the city’s main source of wealth. 

The route begins at the water and meanders through tightly knit neighbourhoods in something that looks very different from the new cultural quarter destinations we’ve become accustomed to. Rather, this route is punctuated by mostly modest, often surprising, occasionally stunning architectural moments. It is a quite brilliant piece of urban acupuncture.

At its heart is the Siyadi Complex, a collection of buildings that includes the house of an old pearl-trading family and once the tallest building in Muharraq. It encompasses the beautifully restored interiors of the dwelling, as well as a small mosque, a complex network of courtyards and the newly created Pearl Museum, a cool, raw space with a pearlescent interior designed by Anne Holtrop.

Holtrop, an urbane and affable Dutch architect who has made Muharraq his home, is also responsible for the restoration and partial rebuilding of the Suq al-Qaysariya marketplace, which once functioned as the pearling place of exchange but had become rundown from use. Holtrop’s interventions are raw and robust, maintaining the workmanlike character of the neighbourhood, introducing deep, shady eaves and creating a street-level layer of gnarly concrete that evokes the mud and earth of the old city. His own office is here too, in a once burnt-out warehouse amid the restored arcades.

A number of other older houses with their distinctive forms, stark exterior walls and tall wind-catching towers are dotted along the path, each restored and made public, each a potential cultural or community venue.

One of the first of the Pearling Path’s completed structures was the Dar Al Muharraq, a vertical extension to an existing structure by Belgian architects Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. This enigmatic building appears draped in a steel mesh veil, a little like chainmail, ruched at its bottom edges like a curtain that is theatrically lifted when an event is taking place inside. Reserved mostly for musical performance (particularly the mesmeric, dirge-like folk music of the pearl fishers), the building’s glass panels also open out to allow the breeze to flow in and the music to trickle out. It is, unusually, a modest and highly dramatic piece of public architecture.

Along the route there are other, smaller public buildings, half-hidden and easy to miss while exploring more of the history of pearling and the small city itself. But perhaps the most surprising and inspiring aspect of this intervention is its attitude to public space.

A landscape strategy led by Belgian office Bureau Bas Smets (currently working on the designs for the landscaping outside Notre-Dame in Paris) alongside Holtrop is characterised by the creation of a handful of small new public spaces scattered along the path and meant for locals. When I visited, there were lads playing football and older people sitting and chatting on the new curving stone benches. If the institutions might be meant for tourists, these spaces were resolutely designed for the working-class inhabitants of Muharraq itself. It is determinedly not a project about gentrification.

This does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the city

The public route is defined by a coherent language of street furniture, something almost always neglected in urban design and relegated to an afterthought or value-engineered out at the last minute. Here streetlamps are designed like lollipops with translucent shades (reminiscent, of course, of pearls) and concrete columns in which sparkle little fragments of mother of pearl in the aggregate.

Street trees are placed, like the lights, exactly on the junctions of large pavers that themselves evoke a kind of carpet defining the edges of the space. Even the bins have been beautifully considered in the same cylindrical concrete language as the street lights. The coherence of the street furniture allows you to follow the trail, picking up on the breadcrumbs of bins, benches and lights, without ever making it too explicit or exclusive, so that this does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the city.

If there is a mis-step, it is perhaps that the exquisite modesty of a meandering walk is contained by four humongous parking garages at its corners. Designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, these are remarkable structures in their own right — sculptural forms in which ramps wrap around and create public platforms in the air. But they are also out of place and out of scale, odd in a scheme that is all about the complexities and encounters of walking, such a rarity in the Gulf. 

The final building on the route (or the first, depending on how you approach it) is another out-of-scale blockbuster — but one that works, I think. Designed by Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati, this gateway/grand finale consists of a vast concrete canopy creating a sort of shaded space beneath it but refusing to define what it might be for.

At its heart is an exhibition hall, austere and bunker-like, but mostly this is just covered space. It reminded me of the kind of thing that might have been erected in the 1970s over an archaeological site (and it does, indeed, turn out to be covering some bulky but missable ruins of warehouses) or perhaps an abandoned megastructure in the Iraqi desert. You might criticise the sheer amount of concrete here, the hundreds of tonnes of embodied carbon just to create a canopy, but, with its odd perforated roof (holes in the shape of houses) and chimney-like towers, it is a thing of powerfully enigmatic urban presence.

In its entirety and complexity this is a remarkable work of urban intervention and its genesis can be traced to a single remarkable figure, Noura Al Sayeh. An architect-turned-client who now works for Bahrain’s Authority for Culture and Antiquities, she turned the project into something surprising and in many ways exemplary. That she is also now married to Holtrop, who moved to be with her in Bahrain, might be noted — they met and married during the process.

It is not often that a group of wildly disparate architects are brought together to create something coherent. This could have been a blockbuster cultural quarter or a ragged collection of discrete monuments, but it has turned into something very different indeed. I struggle to think of a better and more thoughtful example of culture and architecture being used to enhance identity and improve everyday life rather than just create a new, generic attraction. You may not find yourself in Bahrain often, but if you do, it’d be a terrible omission not to take a couple of hours or so to indulge in following this remarkable path.

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Dolly Parton’s husband Carl Thomas Dean, who has died at age 82, helped birth one of the most iconic songs of her career.

The country music star, 79, has explained that her 1973 hit “Jolene,” in which she begs the beautiful title woman not to take her man, was inspired by a real bank teller’s interactions with her husband.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR in 2008. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

Parton told “60 Minutes Australia” this occurred after she and Dean first got married in 1966.

Watch Dolly Parton perform hit song ‘Jolene’

Lyrics to ‘Jolene’ by Dolly Parton sparked by young fan

The name Jolene, though, had a different origin. Parton revealed to NPR that she once signed an autograph for a “beautiful little” 8-year-old girl named Jolene, and the name stood out to her.

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

“She had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph,” Parton told NPR. “I said, ‘Well, you’re the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?’ And she said, ‘Jolene.’ And I said, ‘Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.’ I said, ‘That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.’”

In the song, Parton sings that Jolene’s “beauty is beyond compare” and tells her, “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man … Please don’t take him just because you can.””

Dolly Parton reacts to Beyoncé’s ‘Jolene’ cover: ‘Wow’

‘Jolene’ covers, from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus

Since its release in 1973, “Jolene” has been covered by numerous artists, from Miley Cyrus to The White Stripes.

Beyoncé’s 2024 album “Cowboy Carter” also included a cover of the track. Parton appeared on the album in an interlude prior to the “Jolene” cover, saying, “You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about? Reminded me of someone I knew back when. Except she has flaming locks of auburn hair.” But the Beyoncé version tweaked the lyrics to “Jolene,” including changing “I’m begging of you please don’t take my man” to “I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man.”

Parton reacted to the cover at the time by writing on Instagram, “Wow, I just heard ‘Jolene.’ Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!” She previously told Knox News that she and Beyoncé have “sent messages back and forth through the years,” adding, “I always thought she was great.”

Dolly Parton’s husband Carl Dean dies

Parton confirmed on Monday that Dean, who was notoriously private during his marriage to the singer, has died. The couple did not have any children together.

Dolly Parton’s rare quotes on Carl Dean – plus what she said just before his death

“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton said in a statement. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”

Contributing: Liz Kellar, Knoxville News Sentinel

“We wanted to create an enfilade and I should use that word sparingly for want of sounding pretentious, but it’s like creating streams so you get the width, depth and full use of the spaces,” smiles architect John McAslan describing the masterplan behind the renovation of his Victorian home in south-west London. “It really is a pull of energy, to move you through from the front door to the garden,” adds his wife, Dava Sagenkahn, dressed in vibrant Issey Miyake Pleats Please.

The journey – or enfilade – through the McAslan home, situated on a leafy, residential street, begins at a knee-height bespoke wooden gate. This unusual design is the initial welcome into the expansive, expressive interior that lies beyond the front door. 

The hallway, with original geometric period tiling, features an oblique, narrow glass window that frames an olive tree planted in an external side return. On the left, it bursts open into a living area, and straight ahead segues into a big kitchen that swings out perpendicularly into a dining area with a vast Vitra table. A wall of sliding glass garden doors filters light across the entire ground floor.

Scotsman McAslan, who founded John McAslan+ Partners in 1993, is a pioneer of intervention and preservation – an architectural approach that favours repurposing (rather than demolishing) old buildings. His multi-award-winning practice is behind some of the most impressive transport hubs in the world including King’s Cross Station, Sydney Metro’s Central Station, the upgrade of Penn Station in New York and Bond Street station on the  Elizabeth Line, alongside residential towers, education centres and museums such as the revamped The Burrell Collection in his home city of Glasgow. While different, each project is underpinned by human-centric architecture that improves the quality of urban life.

When it came to conceiving this house, the McAslans were not interested in statement-making grandeur but in creating a beautiful environment in which to live, love, think and work. For John, the methodology is the same. “It was about transforming the old into new, which is what a lot of the work of the practice is about. We wanted to open it up, retain what we could, set a budget and develop a language of architecture and design that was an expression of us,” he says. “The central idea here was to get the energy of the house circulating front to back and retain, remodel and upcycle what existed to varying degrees – we had an ecological, fabric-first approach.”  

Since the early 1980s, the couple lived in four different properties in Notting Hill. As John was building his business, Dava was working in recruitment while raising three children, Hannah, Flossy and Renwick, who have now all left home. There was no urgency to move, rather a gentle yearning for more light, sky and a sense of expansiveness, which is hard to find in the densely occupied city.  

Moving south of the river was not on the agenda until their daughter Hannah, a lawyer who lives in the area, spotted the property and went for a recce, iPhone in hand. She sent the video to John and Dava who were on holiday at their restored farm south of Florence. They swiftly put in an offer. “We’ve never done that before. We’re normally forensic,” laughs Dava of the almost blind bid and the serendipitous events that landed them the keys. 

The core renovation with the construction company Davies & Daughters involved knocking down walls, opening up all the spaces, building out into the garden and ripping out a “circus tent” conservatory. “It was an awful octagonal makeshift ’70s one – boiling in the summer and leaky in the rain,” says John, rolling his intense blue eyes. It was reconfigured into a punched-out space that now frames a small kidney-shaped garden landscaped by Jack Newlyn and enclaved by bamboo and neighbouring trees. 

The first floor hosts John and Dava’s bedroom, a private sitting room and an emerald-Bisazza-tiled en suite bathroom with a curvilinear wall. The top floor houses two super-size flexible sleep-living spaces for guests and family, with extended eaves that create new volumes and light. The upstairs bathrooms are vivid lime green “cubes” with a painted floor, ceiling and wall in the same wake-me-up hue. “The layout of the house is clear and direct, with flexibility: the ground floor is entirely open, engaging the hall, reception spaces, extended kitchen, garden room and fully opening into and through the garden,” says John, who admits he has an aversion to rooms with closed doors. “The first floor is our apartment, and the top floor is a suite of connected spaces that can open or close as needs be.” “I feel I can use every room,” says Dava. “There are times when I take my laptop and go all the way up to the top of the house and it’s just great.” 

There were a few trouble spots, including a damp, rotting cellar that required gutting and fixing to make way for a utility area. “How we avoided electrocution, I don’t know!” says Dava of the early renovation. They moved in permanently in March 2024. Perhaps unusually, the couple were aligned on pretty much all aspects, including the wood-panelled walls and simple single strips of shelving (by John Cherrington of Windmill Furniture) that feature throughout. The Strong White (Farrow & Ball) wall paint changes with the light, accented by breezy voile curtains, citrus-green blinds (that beam optimism from the street view) and the wide oak floorboards.  

The couple first met in the late 1970s in Boston at the canteen of the architectural practice Cambridge Seven Associates, where John had just landed an internship as a recent graduate from Edinburgh University. Dava was working as an executive assistant to one of the partners. It was a coup de foudre. “I said to myself, well, I’m going to marry her. This was she! So I stayed my year and I think on the last day I asked you out or something,” smiles John, who returned to London to work at Richard Rogers and rack up a phone bill calling his sweetheart. A transatlantic courtship ensued before Dava moved to the UK in 1981 and they wed. “Not really knowing each other, but enough to know,” laughs Dava. “This was not anything I ever planned when I was burning my bra with my feminist sisters: a, to get married; or b, to marry someone I didn’t know very well.”

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The couple share a love of adventure, travel, family and collecting that is writ large in their collection of furniture, art and artefacts. The cane and teak furniture is a combination of original armchairs designed by Pierre Jeanneret for Chandigarh in the 1950s, with a number of pieces recently made by Phillips Antiques in India in reclaimed teak. The wooden screens by Artek were designed by Alvar Aalto in 1936, and they own a standout Brazilian petal table by Jorge Zalszupin from the 1960s. “We dressed the interiors with an array of panelled wall assemblies – some open and some closed – for our library. The artefacts, collected over time and very personal to us, express our journey individually and as a family,” says Dava.

There is a luminescent collection of Bakelite pieces (many found in Martha’s Vineyard) perched on cabinets; a vintage Missoni rug alongside colourful abstract floor coverings, some sketched by John and handwoven by Shyam Ahuja in Mumbai. The artworks, casually leaning on the narrow shelves and coursing up the stairwells, range from an exquisite sketch of two female bottoms by their daughter Flossy (John swears it is better than Klimt) to contemporary Indian abstract painters, and a very early American 1869 Shield, Eagle and Flags stamp (one of a series purchased for their children) to celebrate Dava’s US roots.

By contrast, there are photographic works by the Indian artist Raghu Rai, alongside Wolfgang Tillmans and Simon Starling. The couple are patrons of emerging artists and the collection is diverse, esoteric and autobiographical – with many humorous anecdotes attached. “We began collecting around 40 years ago when we first married, starting with Peter Blake’s pencil studies of a lady’s bottom made in 1955 when he was a student at the RCA. From there we focused on European expressionists like Paul Klee, Jean Metzinger, Erich Mendelsohn, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay and Giorgio Morandi,” says John. They also share a love of abstract Indian painters including Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta and Francis Newton Souza – a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group.

The duo are strong believers in community and in preservation. In 2010, they fundraised £3.5mn with the local community in Argyll to save Dunoon Burgh Hall, an 1874 arts venue in the seaside town of Dunoon, where John grew up. The building was in danger of being torn down, so they bought it for £1. It is now a thriving cultural hub and there are plans to establish a library and archive centre with their vast collection (around 2,500) of architectural and art books. McAslan is also lobbying the GLA and central government as part of a Social and Affordable Housing Initiative calling for the adaptive reuse of redundant “grey belt” office space (estimated at 24mn sq ft) as a sustainable alternative to the push for new-build homes.  

One of the biggest eye-openers for John is the newfound joy of crossing the Thames en route to work. “I think of the Kinks and ‘Waterloo Sunset’, romantic meetings and all that stuff. But the big change is having that distance between work and home,” he says. Not to mention the novelty of using the Overground and Underground. “When he first got on the train, we thought he might not come back!” says Dava. But now both have the pleasure of coming home through an elegant front gate. Four neighbours have already inquired after its provenance. “It is our gate!” they laugh in unison.

The deaths of Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa may still be unsolved, but new details about their pets and health are emerging.

The actor, his pianist wife Arakawa and their dog were found dead by authorities in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home on Wednesday. 

According to a search warrant affidavit, authorities found the actor in a mudroom near his cane, appearing to have fallen, while his wife Arakawa was found in an open bathroom near a space heater, with an open prescription bottle and pills scattered on the nearby countertop. A deputy observed Arakawa with “body decomposition, bloating in her face” and mummification of her hands and feet.

One of the couple’s dogs was also found dead less than 15 feet from Arakawa in a crate, while two other dogs were found alive in the bathroom near Arakawa and outside.

Here’s what else is new as the investigation continues.

Search for gas leaks and carbon monoxide results in ‘no significant findings’

On Tuesday, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office issued an update based on the New Mexico Gas Company’s “extensive investigation for gas leaks and carbon monoxide at Gene Hackman’s home,” which was conducted the evening of Feb. 26.

“There were no significant findings. NMGC did issue five (5) red tags. One red tag was for a minuscule leak (0.33% gas in air – not a lethal amount) at one of the stove burners,” the news release states. “The other four red tags were for code enforcement violations -not involving gas leaks or carbon monoxide – involving a water heater and gas log lighters installed in three fireplaces.”

These results “are not believed to be a factor in the deaths of Gene Hackman, Betsy Arakawa or their dog,” the sheriff’s office noted.

However, the findings were sent to the Office of the Medical Investigator “for consideration.”

Gene Hackman cause of death

The exact cause of death still has not been determined. Authorities have called the circumstances “suspicious,” though a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said foul play is not suspected. Police are in the process of putting together a timeline of the couple’s deaths, with early reports suggesting the couple could have been dead for over a week.

Gene Hackman, Betsy Arakawa died with Australian Kelpie mix named Zinna: Exclusive

USA TODAY has learned that police, in an affidavit for a search warrant, misidentified the dog that the couple died with, which led media to incorrectly report their German shepherd had perished.

The dog who died in the Hackman home was actually Zinna, a 12-year-old reddish Australian Kelpie mixed-breed who had once trained in agility skills to compete at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Her body was found in a closed crate in the home, according to Joey Padilla, who transported the surviving dogs to his facility, Santa Fe Tails. The couple’s surviving dogs are Bear, a German shepherd, and Nikita, a 7-year-old Akita-shepherd mix.

Gene Hackman’s dog: Sheriff’s office makes error in initial death report

USA TODAY visited the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, the county agency responsible for housing animals when they are found with deceased owners. Officials there referred all questions to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, who said deputies may have just misidentified the breed.

Gene Hackman’s friends reveal late actor’s health was in decline months before death

According to family friends Daniel and Barbara Lenihan, Hackman’s condition was “really slipping” in the “last couple of months” before his shocking death, the couple shared with People magazine in an interview published Friday.

Gene Hackman’s friends reveal late actor’s health was in decline months before death

While the Lenihans did not disclose details on Hackman’s failing health, Daniel Lenihan noted that the Oscar-winning actor was “essentially kind of homebound,” with Barbara Lenihan adding that the 95-year-old had stopped riding his bike through their Santa Fe, New Mexico, neighborhood.

Gene Hackman, Betsy Arakawa rebuilt New Mexico property

Hackman lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for four decades, much of that time in the couple’s remodeled property.

Gene Hackman’s refuge – and mysterious death – at his Santa Fe home with wife Betsy Arakawa

The “French Connection” actor turned to the city – and a two-story green stucco estate – after retreating from Hollywood. The home blended pueblo, colonial and Spanish baroque styles and was rebuilt from the studs, according to Architectural Digest, with Hackman involved intimately with the design of the home.

Contributing: Anna Kaufman and KiMi Robinson, USA TODAY

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