This is BOP's final selection of our cultural highlights of 2011 - architecture and discoveries of the year. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them. We'd love to hear your choices too.
Architecture
A number of striking new cultural buildings opened this year including the Riverside Museum in Glasgow and the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury. Will such schemes be a thing of the past in the age of austerity?
New building of the year: The Hepworth Wakefield (architect: David Chipperfield).
A triumph of light and space that wonderfully showcases the collection and blends beautifully with the weir; at last, a reason to visit Wakefield!
Regeneration project of the year: Central St Martins, King’s Cross (architect: Stanton Williams)
The new Central Saint Martins campus at Kings Cross is stunning and it anchors the huge Kings Cross Central regeneration scheme: deft building design combined with clever place-making.
Refurbishment of the year: National Museum of Scotland (museum design: Ralph Appelbaum Associates)
It was nice before, but it’s a fabulous space since the re-opening!
Discoveries
This category includes those things, places or people that the rest of the world may have known about, but which we only stumbled across in 2011.
Frank’s Café and Campari Bar
The Frank’s Bar / Bold Tendencies double act at the top of their Peckham multi-storey car park deserves a prize. It’s a superb venue for a summer drink, a band, and to look at some interesting (but mostly awful) sculptures.
Steffen Dam: A Danish artist whose elegant riffs (in glass) on plant and marine life really caught the eye at the Craft Council’s COLLECT fair in the early summer.
Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir: First published in France in 1966, this is a mesmerising portrait of how consumerism shapes the way we construct our identity and present ourselves to the external world.
Georgia (former Soviet republic of): OK, I sort of knew where Georgia was before, but on a visit this year I was really struck by the vibrancy of its capital, its hospitable people, its food, and the beauty and variety of the landscapes once you leave Tbilisi.
Vik Muniz: A Brazilian artist based in New York, Muniz is a vivid example of how the arts can change lives. One of his projects, portrayed in the documentary Wasteland, involved him working with garbage pickers in Rio de Janeiro: the art they created together has been shown in galleries around the globe.
Finally, a rediscovery. This list, and others like it, focus on the new, but the pleasures of re-visiting classics can be considerable. As we age, we bring different perspectives and experiences to our encounters with great work.
Rediscovery of the year: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
I’ve started re-reading novels, and it’s a revelation. The story and its characters are the same but the nuance and the meaning are different. Bleak House is still a rattling good detective story and satire on the law and lawyers, but now what I love are the reflections on how to live well and, in particular, on the nature of love and the curse of money.
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