London Food & Culture

Last chance to catch the London Festival of Architecture

Our city’s built environment is being debated and celebrated via the LFA’s programme of over 200 events. Catch the final ones, and see the pavillions before its all over

Red Pavilion Photo: Jon Bosworth
The Red Pavilion Photo: Jon Bosworth

With the capital’s very fabric evolving at such pace, the annual London Festival of Architecture event has never felt more important. And appropriately enough, its epicentre in 2015 is among the cranes and scrubbed up coal and grain sheds of King’s Cross… by way of Ireland.

The intriguing Irish twist comes courtesy of two striking pavilions in Lewis Cubitt Square, which serve to highlight the influence and strength of Irish design globally. Catch them this weekend before they make way for the crowds and big screen showing live feeds from Wimbledon, aka the Strawberries and Screen season.

The Red Pavilion (by TAKA, Clancy Moore and Steve Larkin) explores architecture’s background role to the activities it contains, while the Yellow Pavilion (Hall McKnight) looks at how the city is assembled from individual pieces, including bricks from a street in Belfast.

You’ve still got time to catch talks, workshops and the odd drinks party held inside both. Or perhaps take a tour of Of Soil And Water, the free swimming art installation just opened nearby, setting a lush natural pond against the rubble and steel girders of Europe’s largest construction site.


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You’ll find events across town far beyond N1C too, of course, the perfect way to explore the transformation of such areas as Elephant and Castle, or Nine Elms, other parts of London undergoing huge, fascinating environmental changes.

Meanwhile, the way we are changing our relationship with our work spaces is central to this year’s theme: ‘work in progress’. The creation of the so-called ‘third place’, a phenomenon that’s become glaring for anyone who’s tried to buy a coffee recently, and discovered they are surrounded by people earnestly conducting big business from a comfy sofa, laptop in one hand, croissant in the other.

London Festival of Architecture runs until 30th June at multiple venues. See website for full details

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