Architecture

Ann Natanson reports on a new scheme to restore the Roman Colosseum to its former gory glory.

A mid-Victorian competition to design new Government Offices in Whitehall fell victim to a battle between the competing styles of Gothic and Classical. The result proved unworthy of a nation then at its imperial zenith.

Richard Bosworth looks at the Vittoriano, the Italian capital’s century-old monument to Victor Emmanuel II and Italian unification and still the focus of competing claims over the country’s history and national identity.

As a major new exhibition on the Aesthetic Movement opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Richard Cavendish explores Bedford Park, the garden suburb inspired by the movement’s ideals.

A project to restore one of the Polish city’s 20th-century monuments has turned into a cultural battleground, writes Roger Moorhouse.

Leo Hollis visits the History Today archive to find an appreciation of Christopher Wren, written by a kindred spirit at a time when both sides of Wren’s genius – the scientist and the artist – were rarely explored.

Harold F. Hutchison introduces the son of royalist gentry, an Oxford graduate, a Professor of Astronomy, a mathematician, and the most distinguished architect that Britain has produced. Leo Hollis added a historiographical postscript in 2010.

Until 1729, London Bridge was the capital’s only crossing over the Thames and a microcosm of the city it served, lined with houses and shops on either side. Leo Hollis looks at the history of an icon.

The building of Istanbul’s new underground railway has uncovered thousands of years of history, including the first complete Byzantine naval craft ever found. Pinar Sevinclidir investigates.