Open House London

Open House London has become a landmark event in the capital's calendar, with a quarter of a million people attending the event and queues to enter buildings snaking down streets. This title provides a glimpse into 100 of the buildings that have taken part in the event.

Guest-edited by Owen Hatherley, thirty-three writers; architects, activists, and Londoners present thirty-three essays exploring famous and unheralded buildings, streets, estates and neighbourhoods across the thirty-three London boroughs.00With contributions from columnist Aditya Chakrabortty to the historian Gillian Darley, via playwright Hanif Kureishi and the politician Emma Dent Coad, the Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs is a journey into the neighbourhoods, housing estates and public buildings of London?s rich urban landscape.00Encompassing everything from Brutalist Polish community centres to suburban garden cities, from pioneering modernist estates to ornate Victorian greenhouses, as seen through everything from grime videos to the films of Patrick Keiller, this book will be a refreshing journey into the city you have been missing, and a celebration of the buildings, places and landscapes which make it special.00In reimagining our guidebook this year we set out to create a book that is as interesting to handle as it is to read. A thoughtful approach to typography and printing conceived by Studio Christopher Victor will bring together the longer essays with highlights from Open City?s extended network of community groups. Richly illustrated with images and artefacts from some of the city?s vast and eclectic museum collections and archives that have remained closed to the public throughout the pandemic, the guide will be offset-printed in London using premium book papers and metallic spot colours.

Peter Salter is an architect and teacher (at the Architectural Association, the University of East London, the University of Bath, and the Welsh School of Architecture) whose work has influenced several generations of students. Walmer Yard, in Notting Hill, is his first residential project in the UK and one of only a small number of buildings he has completed worldwide. Although modest in scale, the project is extraordinary in many ways. On an irregularly shaped site, Salter's design brings four houses into a complex relationship with each other, half-formal, half-familiar, interdependent yet solitary. Similarly, the relations among the core team who developed the design are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter Salter's unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter's current collaborator) were student contemporaries. This book documents the project with Peter Salter's original pen-and-ink drawings and H�l�ne Binet's extraordinary photographs.

One man's spiritual journey is about to begin... after he's sent this tweet When Yasser decides to take part in itikaf, sleeping and fasting in the mosque for the last ten nights of Ramadan, he soon regrets his decision. But as he navigates smug worshippers, shared bathrooms, and recurring thoughts of chunky chips, Yasser's isolation forces him to confront a side of himself he's been trying to keep hidden. A moving and funny new play by Shahid Iqbal Khan, 10 Nights is the story of one man's journey of self-discovery and facing the consequences of your actions.

William Morris and his Palace of Art is a comprehensive new study of Red House, Bexleyheath; the only house commissioned by William Morris and the first independent architectural work of his close friend, Philip Webb. Morris moved in to Red House as an ebullient young man of 26, with an independent income and a head brimming with ideas and the persistent question of ‘how best to live? Red House, together with its Pre-Raphaelite garden, stands as the physical embodiment of his exuberant spirit, youthful ambition, passionate medievalism, creativity and great sense of possibility. For five intense years from 1860–5, it was a place of halcyon days – happy family life, loyal friendship, good humoured competition, and the jovial campaign of decorating; furnishing the house and designing the garden. Drawing on a wealth of new physical evidence, this book argues that Red House constitutes an ambitious and critical chapter in his design history. It will re-consider the inspiration it provided for the founding of ‘the Firm’ of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (later Morris & Co.), in 1861, and the vital collaboration of Webb, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and their intimate circle in realising Morris’s dream for his house.

Housing and the City explores housing histories, theories, and projects in diverse geographies. It presents a geographically dispersed history of the twentieth-century modern housing project and its social diagram, juxtaposed with case studies from the past and the present that suggest that we can live and work differently. While the contributions are diverse in their theoretical approach and geographical situation, their juxtaposition yields transversal connections in the conception of the home and the city and highlights the diversity of architectural solutions in the formation of housing and its communities. The collection also reveals architecture’s contribution to the construction of the self and communities, the individual and the collective—as both urban spatial entities and socio-political concepts. Housing and the City provides essential reading for students, academics, and practitioners interested in the history, theory, or current design of housing. At a time when cities are witnessing new ways of working, changing social demographics, increased geographical mobility, and mass migrations, as well as the pervasive threat of the climate crisis—all trends exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic—Housing and the City presents a historical and theoretical reflection on the question: what does it mean to be at home in the city in the twenty-first century?