Deependra Prashad, the chairman of the Indian branch of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture, and Urbanism (INTBAU) has won the Indian Building Congress Award for Excellence in the Built Environment for his design of the Shriram Junior High School in Mawana, U.P. The small primary school was commissioned by the sugar company which owns the industrial campus on which the school sits. Managers were concerned that workers were sending their children to schools further away from the site, and so began a non-profit school arm to breathe new life into the old school. This included a new building designed by Deependra Prashad.

Mawana has an extremely variable climate — INTBAU notes — with dusty winds and extremes of high and low temperatures. The new school was planned to overlook protected courtyards, spaces which also provide a shaded area for the various activities of students. These courtyards work as classroom spillouts, and include sitting spaces, planting, water features and play sculptures. Each courtyard, by shading the airspace inside, contributes to the comfort of the overall microclimate and ventilation.

Temperature and pressure differences in between the courtyards and outdoor spaces help the cooled air circulate into the classrooms, while hot air from the classroom circulates out through high ventilators located at ceiling-level. The courtyards also bring diffused light into the classrooms. As the building work was promoted by a non-profit trust, there were severe cost constraints on the building programme. The school uses strong, locally available materials including exposed clay brick which reduces the cost and maintenance of plastering and paint, while utilizing skilled masons to create arches for openings reducing the requirement of steel.

Many of the building’s features are developed with brick, including the walls, open arched niches for windows and perforated screens. Local Kota stone and Sandstone is used for hard-paving where required. This approach results in a contextual aesthetic — a fit between building and place — and also allowed for an easy construction process using local labour.

The school building allows stormwater to be harvested, which can be used for floor-washing and horticulture and which is accessed from its underground storage tank by a handpump. Natural light is also the chief source of light inside the school, with energy efficient fluorescent lamps installed for use on cloudy or otherwise dim days.

The new school is located adjacent to the old school, close to the workers’ homes. This provides children with an easy walk to school, and also allows parents to be more involved in their children’s education.

Now the Free State’s Naspers-owned daily has been redesigned (c.f. the genial Charles Apple). The stately dignity of its former logo has been coldly replaced by the boringest of banners. Newspaper banners consisting of light text on dark backgrounds are tricky to pull off well. The Guardian does it, as does Le Figaro, but I’ve never really been convinced by either effort. Both, however, are better than Volksblad‘s choice of a supremely dull and featureless typeface for their banner. It has a real Anytown, USA feel to it.

Bring back the old’un! Luckily the redesign of Die Burger, my daily newspaper of choice when I was luxuriating in the comforts of the Western Cape, was much more of an aesthetic success.

The calles and avenidas of Madrid are decorated with some of the most elegant apartment house entry halls in the world. What a delight to take a stroll just after sunrise when doors are flung open, floors are swept, brass is polished—the city’s portales are made ready to welcome and to bid goodbye in style.

It’s the perfect place to compose oneself, button up a coat, search pockets or purse for a note, or deal with an umbrella (rarely a requirement in Madrid), before facing the porter or the street. …

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I wish all our readers the very best for this Christmas season and I hope we will all enjoy innumerable blessings in this coming year.

From 1307, the OPs occupied this particular site in Norwich until the Henrician Revolt, when the friary was dissolved and the city’s council purchased the church to use as a hall for civic functions. The nave became the New Hall (later St Andrew’s Hall) while the chancel was separated and used as the chapel for the city council and later as a place of worship for Norwich’s Dutch merchants. (The last Dutch service was held in 1929).

The complex has been put to a wide variety of uses. Guilds met here, as did the assize courts. It was used as a corn exchange and granary. King Edward VI’s Grammar School began here. Presbyterian and Baptist non-conformists worshipped in various parts during the late seventeenth century. William III had half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences minted here. In 1712, the buildings became the city workhouse until 1859, when a trades school was established the continues today elsewhere as the City of Norwich School. The East and West Ranges are now part of the Norfolk Institute of Art and Design.

Hopkins Architects, a firm responsible for many noteworthy projects, were commissioned in April 2009 to bring the St Andrew’s & Blackfriars Hall up to date as a multi-purpose functional space to be used for conferences, dinners, performances, and other events. Their plan aims at “transforming the existing buildings into a regionally important cultural and conference venue and an accessible community facility for the city and beyond”.

“The scheme will improve the setting of The Halls in relation to the urban realm around them,” the group claims, “and set out a series of sensitive alterations and additions to enhance and extend their current usage and life. Underlying any new proposals will be the concept of restoring the clarity and meaning of the primary spaces which formerly comprised the friary complex.”

Their schema seems relatively inoffensive and should work towards preserving this complex of buildings until such time as it can be reclaimed by an appropriately expanded Dominican Order in these islands.

ON MY WAY TO the Cavalry & Guards Club yesterday for lunch with an ancient veteran of King’s African Rifles (“Hardly qualify for this place — Black infantry!”) I realised I was a bit ahead of schedule and so took a gander at Cambridge House, the former home of the Naval & Military Club on Piccadilly. It’s surprising that an eighteenth-century grand townhouse of this kind has sat in the middle of the capital completely neglected, unused, and falling apart for over a decade.

Cambridge House was built from 1756 to 1761 by Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont, nephew of the 7th Duke of Somerset and younger brother of Percy Wyndham-O’Brien, the 1st Earl of Thomond (of the second creation), as well as an enemy of the radical John Wilkes. The architect was Matthew Brettingham the Elder, better known for his more impressive work for the Curzons at Kedleston.

Given its progenitor, it was originally known as Egremont House. Early in the 1820s, however, it was sold to George Cholmondeley, 1st Marquess of Cholmondeley and thus became known as Cholmondeley House (pronounced “chumley”, of course). In 1829 it came into the hands of Field Marshal H.R.H. The Prince Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Tipperary, Baron Culloden, &c. The Duke was the tenth child of George III & Queen Charlotte and with his long occupancy No. 94 Piccadilly became stuck with the name of Cambridge House.

When the Duke died in 1850, Lord Palmerston bought the place and lived here during most of his two premierships. After Palmerston’s death in 1865, Cambridge House was purchased by the Naval & Military Club. The Naval & Military had been founded just a few years before because the three other military clubs in London — the United Service Club, the Junior United Service, and the Army & Navy — had all reached their full capacity of membership. The club organised the traffic into the forecourt of Cambridge House by affixing large letters stating ‘IN’ on the west gate and ‘OUT’ on the east gate, thus gaining for itself the nickname of “the In and Out”.

The Naval & Military survived here for over a century but by the 1990s, they had begun to find Cambridge House a cumbersome load to bear. In 1999, they sold up and moved to No. 4, St James’s Square, the former London home of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, the New Yorker whose wife Nancy was the first woman to take her seat as an MP in the House of Commons (Countess Markievicz, the first female MP, having been a Sinn Féin abstentionist). The building was sold to Syrian millionaire Simon Halabi, who planned to turn combine it with surrounding buildings and turn it into a hotel, with swimming pool and squash courts beneath the forecourt. Halabi’s enterprises went under, however, and so Cambridge House has been left to rot and ruin for ten years.

This summer it was finally sold (alongside its adjoining properties) for £150 million to David and Simon Reuben, the enterprising pair of brothers from a Bombay Jewish family. The Reubens say it’s too early to tell what they might do with the property. Perhaps sell it on to the current Duke of Cambridge, giving the Prince & Princess William a happy home right on Green Park? Grandma’s house (Buckingham Palace) is just across the park, after all.

The thrones of the Viceroy and Vicereine of Ireland once sat on a raised dais in St. Patrick’s Hall in Dublin Castle. After dominion status was granted and the Irish Free State was born, the thrones had their crowns knocked off and the Victorian royal cypher removed. The harp of the Irish state arms was embroidered onto the Viceroy’s throne and it was first used as a presidential chair during the inauguration of Prof. Douglas Hyde as the first President of Ireland in 1938. The Vicereine’s throne, meanwhile, was shorn of its gold and is now employed as the chair of the Cathaoirleach, the presiding officer of Seanad Éireann.

The fabric on the thrones was originally a quite elaborate version of the British royal arms, surrounded by shamrocks. I’ll admit that the hodge-podge, two-tone blues of the throne as it is now is a bit jarring, but surely something similar to the original fabric can be commissioned, with the state arms surrounded by shamrocks, and perhaps the addition of the harp to the blank space where the royal cypher once was. Recycle, don’t replace!

Krige’s painting of Clifton beach (above) was tucked into a corner and captivated me immediately. Some art looks better on a screen than in real life, but this was the opposite. The colours and strokes hypnotised me and transported me back to the strand itself, with the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks that divide Clifton’s five beaches. For a number of minutes I stood there entranced by Krige’s view and made two failed attempts to move on before finally tearing myself away.

There were five Kriges up for auction, but besides Clifton only the two portraits — “Xhosa girl” and “Gardener (Montagu)” — intrigued me. The strong colours and delineation mark Krige’s work though the same qualities are not unknown in the more popular, the more expensive (and in my opinion overpriced) Irma Stern. “Watussi Woman”, the best Stern in the show, reached £1,161,250 (R14,768,900 / €1,334,623 / $1,846,852) before the final gavel, easily the highest-earning of the sale. Rather typically of my tastes (and the depressed market), of the five works by Francois Krige included in today’s sale only one sold, a Cape Town cityscape from within the artist’s Dorp Street studio (£16,250 / R206,538).

We don’t pay much attention to newspaper design in the Middle East as their newspapers do not often show up on our radar. Al-Ahram still has a certain cachet, and I’ve always had a soft spot for L’Orient-Le Jour despite its ugly design mostly because I love their doubly old-fashioned hybrid nameplate. The Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar recently underwent a bit of a redesign which might be worth taking a brief look at.

The first element to examine is the newspaper’s nameplate. An-Nahar (النهار) means “The Morning” and has adopted a crowing cockerel as its emblem. The old nameplate (above) featured the sky-blue cockerel with a background a shade darker, with the newspaper’s title transgressing the chicken’s neck. The overall composition is encumbered with too many finicky add-ons. These have been eliminated in the new nameplate (below) in which everything is simplified. The cockerel is a solid tone, located above the sinuous script of the cursive name. Unnecessary additaments have been removed and the result is a cleaner look.

One thing I entirely approve of in newspaper design are little vignettes or dingbats in that etched style. An-Nahar has added one depicting rolls of newsprint, boxes of type, the pen, printed newspapers, with Levantine architecture looming in the background. It’s a little crowded, but the style is nice, and we generally approve of such things.

The criticisms: I dislike an advertisement taking up an entire half of the newspaper’s page one, and I prefer to get a reasonable number of stories on the front-page. One of the errors The Scotsman made when shifting to tabloid size was becoming a one-giant-story newspaper. Then again, the ever-declining Daily Telegraph, while remaining a broadsheet physically, has also increased the number of single-story, all-column-spanning, one-headline front pages in recent years. A proper broadsheet would restrict this to events of genuine importance but we can’t expect much from a newspaper that prints lies.

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