THREAD: the Italians have a very special way with their apartment buildings, with do many of them almost being pieces of art for the city... lets start with Condominio in piazza Carbonari, 1960 - 1961, Milan, by Luigi Caccia Dominioni Look at this ‘everyday beauty’ (of which there are soooo many) with a slice taken out of it, in Milan, by Giancarlo Malchiodi

THREAD: Theres an incredible legacy of Synagogue architecture in many countries & cities wher ther hav been jewish communities, many from the period of Jewish emancipation in Europe &after, tho of course many more going back up to 2k yrs. Here the operatic Tempio Maggiore di Roma Another photo of the interior of Rome's wonderful synagogue, Image source for previous tweet: alamy.com/stock-photo/th…

THREAD: One of the world’s great anomalies, Kyoto Station by Hiroshi Hara (1997) is a town-sized, public megastructure, fully built in one go to the coherent and total vision of a brilliant architect, effectively acting as a vast manifesto… or maybe as close as one might get to actually BEING inside the architect’s imagination… not only is it almost too vast to fully comprehend, like Lutyens’ great design for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, it knows how to emphasise its scale…

THREAD: Shin Takamatsu is 1 of Japan’s greatest living architects, with an incredibly unique & beautifully executed body of mysterious & pregnant work that ought 2b far better known, & probably wld be if they fit a more stereotypical idea of Japanese design.... architect’s photo This detail & the previous image are of his Kirin Plaza in Osaka from 1987, sadly, like several of his best works, demolished (in 2009). Photo from the architect’s site

THREAD: I am totally obsessed with this building, Kenzo Tange’s imperiously elegant Tokyo Metropolitan Government complex from 1990 that is a Akira-style fusion of intricate granite ornament that recalls circuit boards and the towering profile of an ancient gothic cathedral… Here you can see the overall profile

THREAD: The great wooden synagogues of the shtetls were probably the greatest ever architectural expression of Yiddish culture. All lost in the Holocaust.





One of the original interiors (theres very little photographic documentation)

THREAD The central hall of Oslo City Hall, Arnstein Arneberg & Magnus Poulsson, 1931-50. This building is a wonder of the world, truly the greatest modern civic building ever conceived and built, and nobody should live a life without having seen it. Its the perfect embodiment of a modernity that avoids arbitrary binaries of structure vs ornament & the narrow myopia of proscribed style, it is a huge structure humming with heroic architectural spaces, incredibly sophisticated ornament and exquisite art encrusting every surface

THREAD: Colour in architecture is 2 often avoided & feared, which is a recent & silly tendency, becos its the most powerful tool we have in creating beautiful, impactful & effective atmospheres thru design. Even the ancients knew this, & their buildings were all brightly coloured The last image was The News Building, Athens, Georgia, by Allan Greenberg from 1992. This is a reconstructed color scheme of the entablature on a Doric temple.

Iv been in love with, & mesmerized by the Thompson Center since I was a child. The most important postmodern public building in the world by far, it is an incomparably complex, virtuoso & ambitious symphony of geometry, polychromy, structure, space & ornament… & is testament to Chicago’s architectural genius… by the great maverick Helmut Jahn who mixed Hi-Tech structural gymnastics with Miesian sophistication and postmodern richness of effect to create absolutely singular spaces