Westbury-sub-Mendip is a village in Somerset, England

with a population of about 800, situated on the southern slopes of the Mendip Hills half-way between the cathedral city of Wells and the world-famous Cheddar Gorge.

Some time ago the village Parish Council bought a traditional British red phone booth from BT for £1 — and then transformed it into a 24-hour book exchange library:

Villagers can use the library (which stocks about a hundred books) just by leaving there a book they’ve read, swapping it for one they haven’t, therefore the books are constantly changing.

This is an amazing way to reuse a former piece of urban furniture, turning it into a 24-hour service — should be done in all small communities.

[photos by Bob Dolby]

Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski is recreating an abandoned wartime bunker in the Barbican’s Curve arts centre — the exhibition is open from 30th September 2009 to 10th January 2010.

See The Curve transformed into a World War Two-era bunker! For his first UK solo show, Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski draws inspiration from his own imagination and personal memories to create a highly atmospheric installation of a bunker. Encounter mysterious rooms, forgotten objects and dark tunnels as you are transported into another time and place.

Renowned for meticulous simulations of historical settings, Kusmirowski’s installations challenge the notion of the real. His works delve into the personal and collective past, unearthing complicated histories and questioning memory.

There’s also a live camera pointed on the bunker while it’s being built.

After Prince Charles got his way causing developers drop Sir Richard Rogers’ masterplan project for Chelsea Barracks last June, things have moved on and there’s now a new list of candidate teams to design new proposals for the site.

Ironically, among the specialists matching up with contestants there are AHMM and Thomas Heatherwick: both firms were previously part of the Rogers’ team.

Also, Robert AM Stern has withdrawn from the contest, replaced by former collaborators of the American firm: Robert Adam Architects and Ash Sakula Architects.

Here’s the updated list of ten contestants:

• Alan Baxter & Associates LLP, Paul Davis and Partners, Liam O’Connor Architects, Heatherwick Studio, and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
• Porphyrios Associates and Allies and Morrison, Townshend Landscape Architects
• Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, KPF London, Paul Murrain, ZEDfactory, Merrill Pastor Colgan Architects, Gillespies Landscape Architects
• Dixon Jones Limited, Glenn Howells Architects
• Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, AHMM, Macreanor Lavington Architects, Alison Brooks Architects, Grant Associates
• Terry Farrell and Partners, Panter Hudspith, Peter Barber Architects, Chris Dyson Architects
• Hamiltons Architects and Think Place and Patel Taylor
• Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, Haworth Tompkins Architects, Churchman Landscape Architects
• Robert Adam Architects, Ash Sakula Architects, LDADesign
• Squire and Partners and Kim Wilkie Associates

[image via e-architect.co.uk]

The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain is sending out a call for papers for its Annual Symposium 2010, which will be held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA, UK) on 22nd May 2010.

The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain invites proposals for twenty-minute papers that interrogate our current understanding of seventeenth-century ‘British’ architecture and explore the geographical horizons of Britain’s architecture in the 1600s. We particularly welcome papers that address the historiography of seventeenth-century British architectural history, and that draw on interdisciplinary methods.

Papers might consider but need not be limited to:
•       The importation of foreign architectural influences into Britain in the seventeenth century.
•       Architectural interactions between continental Europe and Britain in the 1600s.
•       The exportation and appropriation of seventeenth-century British architectural modes beyond Britain.
•       Colonialism and plantation architecture in Ireland and the Americas.
•       Borderland architecture of the 1600s.
•       Representations and interpretations of British national pasts in seventeenth-century architecture.
•       Expanding the ‘geography’ of British seventeenth-century architecture to include neglected architects and neglected building types.
•       The treatment of English architecture within the historiography of Scottish, Welsh or Irish architectural history.
•       How the architecture of seventeenth-century Britain has been interpreted by later periods as part of the myth and reality of national identity.
•       Revivals of Britain’s seventeenth-century architecture in different periods and different countries.

The convener for the symposium is Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner. Proposals of no more than 300 words for papers of twenty minutes should be sent to Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner by email: olivia.horsfallturner@tcd.ie, or by post:
Department of the History of Art,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2,
Ireland.

Submissions must be received by 14 December 2009, and notices of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by 15 January 2010.

More info to be found on the SAHGB website.

Giles Miller co-founded Farm, a British design collective, back in 2006.

Having graduated from the Royal College of Art, he’s now launching his own brand during London Design Festival 2009.

Giles Miller at Kingly Court – Unit 1.12 Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London, W1B 5PW
until 26th September 2009 (open 10am – 6pm daily)

New York-based practice Steven Holl is the winner of the “Mackintosh” contest to design a £50 million new building for the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), right opposite the beautiful building by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Renfrew Street, Garnethill.

It will be Steven Holl’s first project in UK and it will be delivered with the help of Scottish practice JM Architects.

Below, architectural drawings of the old C R Mackintosh GSA building, completed in 1909:

[via AJ]

[via AJ]

Prince Charles wrecked Richard Rogers‘ plans for the third time.

Last Friday at 9am, the phone rang at Richard Rogers’s hi-tech ­office by the Thames at Hammersmith, west ­London. On the line was an aide to ­Qatar’s royal family, the architect’s ­client on a multibillion pound housing project on the site of the former Chelsea barracks. The news was not good. After two and a half years of design work and days before expecting to win planning permission, the award-winning firm was sacked. The royal aide told ­Rogers a press statement would be released within an hour. ­Rogers desperately argued his corner, trying to persuade the Qataris they were making a mistake, but he could tell the game was up. His name was never mentioned, but everyone knew: Prince Charles had struck again…

Richard Rogers is now quite angry, of course — nobody likes people interfering in their job, even if such people are “unemployed individuals” which, incidentally, are also members of the Royal family. He says what Prince Charles did (id est writing a letter to the Qatari royal family to promote an alternate, more classicist design for the site, by Quinlan Terry, which he’s been backing since the beginning.) is non-constitutional, as his project being put off is not due to a democratic debate but only because of his interference.

The former Chelsea Barracks in London — Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

When photographing buildings, beware of which building you’re pointing your camera at: Edward Denison, a British photographer, was held in custody as a terrorist suspect (see: Prevention of Terrorism Act), because he was taking a pic of a building which, incidentally, is the City of London Police headquarters, at 37 Wood Street.

You can read his story on Open Democracy.

(via the CHAT mailing list, thanks to Paul Belford)

Almost there…:

[photo by Stefania Pilla -  used with permission]

This is how it was in August 2008.

More pics on its dedicate group on Flickr.