New date for Antoni Gaudí’s basilica announced but enormous, controversial stairway will take another eight years

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia basilica has a new completion date of 2026, which will come 144 years after the first stone was laid.

The president of the organisation tasked with completing Antoni Gaudí’s masterwork announced the date last Wednesday, which coincides with the centenary of the death of the building’s architect.

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Battersea, London
An old barber shop redesigned by architects Brisco Loran as their own live-work space is the latest project from developer Duncan Blackmore, a man on a mission to repurpose quirky urban spaces in a positive way

Everyone knows that high streets are under threat, caught in spirals of decline driven by the rise of online shopping. It’s also obvious, or should be, that the government’s big idea for responding to this crisis, which is to make it possible to convert shops into homes without planning permission, mostly makes things worse. Welcoming shop fronts get replaced by crude brick walls with sash windows punched into them. Dead space is created on the frontage; footfall slackens. The high values of residential property give owners a strong incentive to close shops and make them into cheap flats – cheap to build, that is, not to buy or rent.

Costa’s Barbers , a project in Battersea, south London, shows how such changes may be done differently. It’s a shop-to-home conversion, except that its design does everything it can to animate the street where it stands, and to leave open the possibility that future uses will involve transactions between inside and out. It’s a work of craft and delight that at the very least brightens its surroundings. It is not, it should also be said, anything to do with cutting hair, but only carries the name of a business long gone from the premises.

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The government deems a solar array’s ‘visual harm’ outweighs its economic benefits, with the Mitsubishi tower it’s the reverse

Last week the government decided to refuse planning permission for a solar farm in Northamptonshire .

This is the same government that last month, possibly encouraged by a letter from the developers Mitsubishi to Rishi Sunak, approved 72 Upper Ground , a prominent, lumpen office block on the South Bank in London.

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After months of isolation in 2020, the Leipzig photographer Albrecht Voss asked his oldest friend to join him on an adventure through the Alps taking pictures of modern architecture. With just 20 days to capture 28 buildings in Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and Germany, the project involved scaling glaciers in the dark and sleeping in empty chapels. “We would aim to be on top of the mountain for golden hour, when the light is very beautiful,” he says. “Then we’d wait until pitch black at night, when the stars are visible.” The process often involved combining images, but Voss, now shortlisted for a Sony world photography award for the series , tried to stay as close to reality as possible. “The reaction I get from people is that it feels like you are really there.”

The Sony world photography awards exhibition is at Somerset House , London, from 19 April to 6 May; albrechtvoss.com

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Campaign to save UK’s oldest working cinema and designate Station Street ‘a historic asset’ launched amid redevelopment plans

There are growing calls to protect a street in Birmingham that was home to the UK’s first purpose-built repertory theatre, a pub that hosted Black Sabbath’s first gig and the country’s oldest working cinema, with two of the three venues now closed down.

The closure last week of the Electric cinema on Station Street, 114 years after it opened its doors as the first movie theatre in the city, has prompted outrage among residents and claims that it could become a victim of cultural vandalism.

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Built offsite in Yorkshire and carefully squeezed into its narrow riverside site, the oak-framed extension to Cambridge’s second oldest college combines Tudor-tech spirit and cutting-edge, ship-in-a-bottle engineering

There’s a lot of talk around about “beauty”. Social media is littered with posts of golden, old, sun-drenched buildings, in which some self-appointed wise man hands down aphorisms on their “spiritual significance”. They come with lamentations that we live in fallen times, that our “morally depraved” society has thoughtlessly tossed away a treasury of beautiful design, sometimes also with a side order of supremacist dog whistle – the buildings in question being mostly classical or Christian rather than Islamic or Hindu – and incel-arousing appeals to “traditional manhood”.

To which one might say, yes, a Parisian boulevard, or a gothic cathedral, or a Greek temple, is beautiful – we can all see that – but why the zero-sum game? Why not see the beauty in modern buildings? Why only in buildings that have pointed arches or classical columns, or some other signifier of tradition?

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The futuristic landmark is to become a hotel: fine. In charge of the project? A designer who likes to put his mark on things

In his 1994 movie London , a classic of poetical-geographical film-making, its director-writer Patrick Keiller speculates that the BT tower, that rises on the site that once contained a flat inhabited by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, is a secret monument to the French poets’ love. This is one of many instances of this structure’s ability to generate myths – legend also had it that, as military secret, it couldn’t be shown on Ordnance Survey maps. With its slender vertical fuselage and long-stalled revolving restaurant, it speaks of the hopeful futurism of the 1960s, of the white heat of technology, of Minis and miniskirts and the Beatles.

Its sale, for £275m, by BT to a hotel group, if it gives the tower a secure future, is welcome. I’m more troubled by the reports that the designer Thomas Heatherwick is to “repurpose” the building. His past work shows that he’s not one to leave well alone, but rather festoon structures with over-sized flower-pots and look-at-me swirling shapes. One can only hope that he discovers some restraint. The BT Tower is already an icon. It’s perfect. Let it be.

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On 8 October 1965, prime minister Harold Wilson officially opened what was then Britain’s tallest building

BT Tower to become hotel as London landmark sold for £275m

The tallest building in London – and in Britain – the 620ft Post Office Tower, off the Tottenham Court Road, was yesterday officially opened by the prime minister.

It was, as Mr Wilson emphasised, an operational opening and to prove the point he picked up a white telephone receiver and spoke to the lord mayor of Birmingham on a microwave circuit. The public will have to wait until next spring at the earliest before it will be allowed up to the viewing platforms and the revolving restaurant. However, the GPO has been using the tower’s equipment already and since July the BBC’s 625-line programmes have been channelled through it.

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The Grade II-listed building, once the tallest structure in Britain and famous for its revolving restaurant, has been sold to a US hotel group for £275m

• BT Tower to become hotel as London landmark sold
• Share your memories of the BT Tower

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