As part of my continuing series “how does his wife tolerate his nonsense?”, we went to Copenhagen over Christmas a few years ago just to wander, eat and unwind. I suggested we do a day trip by train over the Öresund Bridge (yes, the one from The Bridge ) to Malmö in Sweden, only revealing after we got there that I wanted to go on a pilgrimage to an apartment block. Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso skyscraper was about a half an hour’s walk from the centre of the city through mostly empty industrial areas in December in almost sub-zero temperatures.
As the building looks out on to the sea, it was the first time I could stand somewhere and accurately say: “It’s Baltic out here today”. If my wife had, understandably, slapped my face, I wouldn’t have been able to feel it. The similar pilgrimages we’ve done in New York in recent years — to British designer Thomas Heatherwick’s giant Vessel structure in Hudson Yards and his Little Island park opposite the bottom end of the High Line — were far more summery and pleasurable.
Which brings me to my first recommendation of this week, Heatherwick’s Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World , where he discusses how finding a book on Gaudi as an art student blew his mind, convinced him that architecture might be for him and opened his eyes to just how boring so many post-World War II buildings are. It’s an impassioned critique of what he calls an “epidemic” of boring buildings the world over; s.