Delights

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

One of the pleasures of making the magazine has been to introduce the 'Delight' section, at the end of the issue. It was conceived as a way of displaying pleasure in the visual world: surprises, new acquaintances, old friends remembered, unlikely chances, curious conjunctions. Subjects could range from buildings (old and new), structures and landscapes, to paintings and other forms of visual art.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

AVIAN ARCHITECT, September 1995

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This is the Village Weaver (Ploceus cucullatus) and its nest which is inevitably built by the male (here in his best mating feathers). If the female likes the nest she finishes its interior, but she won't be attracted unless the outside is covered with strips of fresh green leaves. If the male can't attract a mate, he pulls the nest down and starts the laborious process of building all over again. P.D.

POETRY OF BROKEN GLASS

October 1994

At St John's College, Oxford, Alexander Beleschenko working with Richard MacCormac to create a screen in which '... the effect is magical, altering in transparency and colour according to your position and the time of day; the screen changes from being an assembly of gem-like fragments, to a visual filter, to an almost opaque space-dividing element. It is a stunning and most unusually successful example of collaboration between artist-craftsman and architect.' P.D.

Photograph: Martin Charles

REGENCY BREAKFAST

April 1995

The most intense, complex, varied, strange, exciting, beautiful, horrid (both in the eighteenth-century sense), joyous and brilliant set of small spaces ever made is surely John Soane's wonderful house and museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. And of all the splendid rooms, the most magical is the breakfast parlour.

The shallow dome floats over the place, its hovering quality enhanced by the sometimes invisible mirror-glazed pilasters that prop its corners, and by the skylight chutes that cast daylight onto the north and south walls. Convex looking glasses in each pendentive both explode and compress the space. P.D.

Photograph: Richard Bryant