Study challenges belief that temple’s curves were designed to correct optical illusions that would have ruined its clean lines

A mathematician has uncovered what may be one of the longest-running myths in history after studying optical illusions and the Parthenon, the famed Greek temple that overlooks Athens.

Scholars have marvelled at the building on the Acropolis hill for more than 2,000 years and heaped praise on its architects for their clever use of geometry. Its subtle curves are said to correct optical illusions that would have otherwise ruined the Parthenon’s clean lines.

A bloated ballroom, a six-storey military HQ, a helipad-cum-cocktail patio, a gilded angel on a giant arch honouring himself … our architecture critic deplores the decorator-in-chief’s mutilation of Washington

When you have a developer as US president, you might expect some zhooshing up of the capital. A few buildings renovated, maybe some parks replanted. But when you have a megalomaniac builder in charge, things can get out of hand. A decade ago, when Donald Trump was first elected, I asked what it might mean for the US to be led by a real estate tycoon whose career had left a trail of broken promises, angry buyers and endless lawsuits, with rules flouted, heritage trampled and the world pockmarked by a fleet of aspirational towers clad with a flimsy veneer of luxury. The answer is worse than I could have imagined.

With the air of a nightmarish Hollywood sequel, Trump 2 has seen the president’s true architectural ambitions unleashed: The Blingpire Strikes Back. As America’s self-styled decorator-in-chief, Trump has not only overseen the gilded mutilation of the White House, but embarked on the Mar-a-Lagofication of Washington DC itself, applying his gold paintbrush to statuary, daubing ponds with flaking pool liner, and brewing plans for a colossal triumphal arch – all procured in a blizzard of no-bid contracts. And, in true dodgy salesman style, this programme of bauble-building is turning out to be a high-profile decoy for deeper damage being wrought elsewhere.

The European Prize for Urban Public Space’s shortlist highlights projects helping people cope with climate crisis

In the words of Joni Mitchell, the planners of many urban centres around the world “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. The European Prize for Urban Public Space tries to show that cities don’t have to be locked in the automotive age for ever.

The prize’s latest shortlist, announced on Wednesday, highlights architectural projects that convert infrastructure for cars into spaces that help urban dwellers cope with the soaring temperatures of the climate crisis: roundabouts that have become splash pools, thoroughfares turned into green havens, and car parks into gardens.

A self-confident woman strides on to the Fourth Plinth, Nan Goldin captures sex, cats and death and even the Turner Prize shows promise this year

• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

The most anticipated exhibition of the year centres on an embroidered epic of war and conquest that miraculously preserves an intimate window on the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. Yet, you may find yourself simply fascinated by the artistry of the Anglo-Saxon women who used coloured wool to depict billowing sails, charging horses and King Harold’s spectacular moustache. Jonathan Jones
• British Museum, London, 10 September to 11 July

Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?

• Last chance to buy the summer issue of The Long Read magazine, now with 15% off. Click here to order

I travelled to Oslo in the early autumn. It felt like arriving into the future. Or, at least, a fragment of a possible future. I drove north in the quiet digital bubble of my electric rental car. In 2024, Norway became the first country in the world where electric cars outnumbered petrol cars.

A smooth, pristine motorway unfolded between farmlands and low hillsides of dense green forest. Long tunnels carried the route up above the banks of Lake Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. After a little more than an hour, the road curved downward to run parallel to the lakeshore.

MVRDV – the firm behind Marble Arch Mound – says Rotterdam ROCKS! will inspire visitors to live sustainably. But in an era when the greenest building is the one that already exists, this tottering cairn looks set to misfire

‘It looks like something Shrek would throw up,” sniffed one online commentator, unflatteringly comparing Rotterdam ROCKS!, the recently unveiled proposal for a waterfront site in Europe’s largest port, with the vomitings of a cartoon ogre. Designed by Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, which gave London the supremely underwhelming Marble Arch Mound in 2021, Rotterdam ROCKS! (the use of EMPHATIC CAPITALS connoting an in-your-face energy) is the winner of a major architectural competition intended to create “a new world wonder”.

But instead of a modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon or contemporary Colossus of Rhodes, MVRDV’s super slick renderings depict a pile of artificial “rocks” (or ROCKS!) stacked together in a humongously scaled tottering cairn, wreathed in suspiciously luxuriant foliage and sluiced by a preposterous waterfall.

From killings in Gaza to the alleged use of a sonic weapon on a vigil in Belgrade, the Lebanese-British artist reveals how his work for activist group Earshot is inseparable from his art

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a double identity. He is an artist who, in 2019, jointly won the Turner prize; and one of his works is, for my money, among the most striking on show at this year’s Venice Biennale. But he is also the director of a young NGO, founded in 2023, called Earshot, which investigates human rights abuses using sound evidence. In less euphemistic language, that means, on occasion, investigating horrific killings. He and his team might analyse the direction and position of bullets Israeli soldiers have fired at emergency workers in Gaza, or build evidence that a sonic weapon was likely used to disperse a mass silent vigil in Belgrade.

The foundational work he did in this field was a project with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture for Amnesty International. Back in 2016, he interviewed rare survivors of the unimaginably barbaric conditions in Syria’s Sednaya prison. There was a paradox at play in this murderous place – prisoners were held in complete darkness, and enforced silence, killed for making any sound. Listening was both the inmates’ only source of information, and a tool for survival and resistance. Their acute sonic memories of screams of distress and pain; keys turning in locks; bread being slapped down outside their cells; even of lice being snapped – helped Abu Hamdan and his colleagues build a picture of the prison architecture and its conditions, nearly a decade before it was opened to the light after the fall of the bloody Assad regime.

Five hundred people turn up to adopt plants from conservatory that will reopen in 2030 after renovation project

Above the waxy monstera leaves and bright pink hibiscus flowers in the Barbican conservatory hangs a giant net to catch the panes of glass that are at risk of falling from the ceiling on the unwitting plant lovers below.

This precarious situation has caused the estate to shutter its greenhouse on the third and fourth floors for three years so a full refurbishment can take place. But the hiatus has a silver lining for many of those who visited on Wednesday to give the plants from the conservatory a new home.

It has been likened to a monster, an oil rig – and the Parthenon. Now, for its 40th birthday, the astonishing London landmark has joined the Open House festival, to grant admirers a rare look around the inside

In his 2012 book A New Kind of Bleak, the critic Owen Hatherley called it “monstrous, compelling” and utterly messed-up. Back in the 1980s, a then Prince Charles suggested it had been inspired by a North Sea oil rig. But none of this stopped it from becoming, in 2011, the youngest ever building to be given Grade I-listed status in the UK.

And now, as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations, the Lloyd’s building will open to the public for the first time since 2014 for one day only during London’s Open House festival. The iconic building in the heart of the financial district was designed by architect Richard Rogers to house the global insurance marketplace. Its futuristic facade has been a celebrated part of the City of London skyline since it opened in 1986, but the interior is rarely seen by the public. Visitor galleries with a view of the trading floor have long been shut for security reasons.

Creating homes for Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Lucille Ball made Williams a star. A trio of new exhibitions shows he belongs among the 20th century’s greats

When you fly into the Los Angeles airport LAX, a spindly space-age contraption is the first thing that greets your eyes outside the window. Built in the early 1960s, the Theme Building – which once attracted travelers to its in-house restaurant, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, towering above airfields – was built by a supergroup of architects whose structures helped define the city’s midcentury aesthetic: William Pereira, Welton Becket, Charles Luckman and Paul Revere Williams.

Of these architects, Williams, the first licensed Black architect in California, arguably shaped the contours of Los Angeles most deeply. In the six decades before his death in 1980, Williams completed an estimated 3,000 structures ranging from single-family residences, commercial buildings, affordable housing projects, the Los Angeles county courthouse, a reimagining of the now-razed Ambassador hotel and opulent homes for celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Perhaps most iconic of all is the Beverly Hills hotel; Williams led its renovation, and its recognizable curlicued sign is scrawled in Williams’s own handwriting.

When temperatures get to 40C inside, and French building regulations won’t even allow shutters, these tenants’ listed homes are simply unlivable

The population of Firminy, south-east France, has been dwindling for decades. Its recent history is one of factory closures in a region built by steel, and locals tell me that many people leave for better opportunities in neighbouring Saint-Étienne, or to live in the Haute-Loire’s countryside.

On the top of a hill, however, stands Firminy’s pride: l’Unité d’Habitation, an imposing tower of concrete designed by Le Corbusier. The architect’s final project is an oddity – a building for people, where two-thirds of the apartments are dedicated to habitations à loyer modéré (or HLM – social housing); but also a piece of history, whose facade and roof were listed as monuments historiques in 1993.

The £20m reboot shows off exhibits ranging from a giant whale skeleton to tiny ‘scrimshaws’ of carved bone to a very strange mermaid, all telling a gripping tale of a great seafaring city

The star attraction of Hull’s revamped and revitalised Maritime Museum is a colossal 40ft-long skeleton of an North Atlantic right whale, beached more than a century ago. The remains of this leviathan dominate an exhibition space scarcely large enough to contain its stupendous bulk. Children can crawl into its ribcage, like junior Jonahs, popping up in a clear plastic dome as digital images of swimming whales slowly unspool across the ceiling.

Docile, leisurely and extremely blubbery – which meant that harpooned carcasses conveniently floated, as well as yielding copious quantities of valuable oil – the North Atlantic right whale was hunted almost to extinction during the whaling era. Today, it’s estimated that there are fewer than 400 left.

Researchers employ technology in a bid to identify and retrieve remains in Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, in Manuel Correa’s emotional documentary

Perched on the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range overlooking Madrid is the Valle de los Caídos, a colossal memorial site constructed under the Franco regime. Supposedly a symbol of atonement and reconciliation, it has been criticised as an emblem of fascist glorification; it was where Franco was buried until his exhumation in 2019. There are, however, tens of thousands more bodies are trapped inside; in the aftermath of the White Terror, the corpses of those executed under the dictatorship were clandestinely removed from mass graves and deposited in the monument’s crypt. Both thought-provoking and heartwrenching, Manuel Correa’s documentary follows three grieving families and their fight to rescue their loved ones from this horrifying limbo.

Here, architecture emerges as a means of oppression. Through examining various construction blueprints, the film lays bare how the crypt was specifically designed for maximum inaccessibility. The bodies of the victims were meant to languish, hidden away, in perpetuity, as does the evidence of the dictatorship’s barbarity. To combat these efforts to bury history, Correa founded the Office of Documentary Research, where activists, geographers, and architects wade through the fog of secrecy with state-of-the-art technology.

‘I was thinking about the Terracotta Army when I took this shot of Birmingham swimmers in their local pool, which faced closure. They had to stand there for an hour, waiting for the sun to come out’

I took this image in Birmingham on 20 July 2014 – part of my first professional photography project. I had moved to the city in 2013 and I would pass this building every day on the bus on my way to the city centre. I remember looking at the facades and being impressed and intrigued by the three different entrances – what were once the first class, second class and women’s entrances.

One day I decided to get off the bus and find out what the building was. The door was open, and a nice lady welcomed me in and started to explain its history. It is the Moseley Road Baths, an Edwardian-era community building. In 2014 the second pool was still operating but the gala pool, where I took this image, was already empty. The building was in need of restoration and, without funding, the council planned to shut it down for good. The woman I met there told me lots of stories about the place – people who had come to learn to swim, how it had served as a casualty station during the second world war, and how it had even been used as a dance hall. It was a very charming place with an incredible history: as soon as I saw the gala pool, I knew I had to fill the majestic empty space.

The Manifesta biennale is taking over a dozen tiny churches in German towns ravaged by division and decline – and filling them with ball games, bouncy castles and a radical community spirit

After Germany’s Ruhr conurbation – the third-largest urban area in western Europe – was pummelled during the second world war, planners came up with an ingenious idea. About 80% of the sprawl – which incorporates big cities such as Essen and Duisburg, and dozens of smaller towns like Bochum and Gelsenkirchen – had been destroyed. And so, for the reconstruction, a newly formed Diocese of the Ruhr built literally hundreds of closely packed Pantoffelkirchen or “slipper churches”, so named because they were close enough to housing developments for churchgoers to walk to mass in their slippers.

Today, Pantoffelkirchen are declining sharply. Estimates of the amount of disused or derelict churches are as high as 300, and 100 have been sold off in the last year alone. Until October, 12 of them are home to Manifesta, the travelling art biennale. They stand as centrepieces of communities that have been ravaged this time not by war, but by deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and environmental decline.

The showcase library’s centenary was celebrated by thousands who filled the still-relevant public institution

The central library in downtown Los Angeles has seen its fair share of colorful moments.

The architectural gem, which turned 100 this week, has been the backdrop to the epic street battle between Pacino, De Niro et al in Heat, and was where the original Ghostbusters came across their first ghost, a friendly older lady librarian who was anything but. Television shows such as Moonlighting; Murder, She Wrote; and LA Law filmed there too, when characters were researching or investigating a case.

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
The Empire State building is caught in bed with the Chrysler Building and a milk bottle turns into a dragon in the raunchy and cheekily provocative work of the Dutch artist and architect

In a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window that surveys the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, shagged out, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building still glows fiery red and on the bedside table the Statue of Liberty’s arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But oh no! The lovers have been caught at it. At the door is the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!

Madelon Vriesendorp’s 1975 skyscraper sex romp drawing Flagrant Délit – “caught in the act” – can be seen twice in her exhibition Mind Games: as a standalone print and as the cover of Delirious New York, the 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas that is both a surreal history of the city and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp is what exactly? An architectural cartoonist? A cartoonist architect? She is certainly more than just a graphic prankster, and won the 2025 Soane Medal given to visionaries who have “furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Hence this show. And it all started with skyscrapers copulating.

As construction costs rise, soulless white-cube housing is becoming the norm in many cities. Here, new-build residents share how they’ve added character to their homes

You’ll recognise the hallmarks. Banners with renders of utopian urban dwellings – a marriage of contemporary lines, streamlined surfaces, open-plan living spaces and floor-to-ceiling glass, alongside manicured green spaces and lifestyle imagery of young professionals and families. Not necessarily the vision of a quarter-acre block with a white picket fence but in urban centres the Australian dream of home ownership is being recast in the form of white-cube, new-build apartments.

In the US, “5-over-1” buildings are fast becoming ubiquitous, while in Europe, where apartments have always been smaller, there’s a rise in shared-space models with communal kitchens and amenities. Shanaka Herath, a senior lecturer at the school of built environment at the University of Technology Sydney, says: “We know that land costs have been rising, construction costs have been rising, so what the builders do is that they build smaller and more affordable units.”

Author argues symbols such as daisy wheels are no more than the working marks of stonemasons

Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses.

Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings”.