Seven carefully chosen pieces that reflect on the stories and ideas behind some AR covers, free for registered users
The Architectural Review turns 130 this year. To celebrate, British designer Margaret Howell has selected five limited-edition cover prints from the AR archive, which are available to view at her flagship store in Wigmore Street and to order from our shop. This week’s reading list dwells on stories that have gone behind the scenes to speak with the artists that made the cover, as well as pieces that provide subjective glimpses into the archive of more than 1,500 covers (1,531 and counting).
Curated from the AR archive, these seven free-to-read stories look at some of the abstract, iconic, crafty and edible versions of our cover.
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130 years of AR covers with Margaret Howell, AR online, May 2026
‘From a microphotograph of a smoke particle to the fishermen’s sheds in Hastings, the collection illustrates a tradition of striking and idiosyncratic covers that the AR continues to this day’
Cover story: Growth and Form exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, AR October 1951
‘Growth and Form afforded a welcome opportunity of entering that ‘new landscape’ which modern science has opened up for the artist but which the ordinary amateur of the arts seldom finds himself in’
Cover story: Seher Shah’s graphite garden, AR Online, February 2021
‘Shah’s long-term interest in the role of drawing works with the historic and intimate through the precise traditions of Renaissance perspective methods with an approach that troubles the rational language of architectural drawing’
Cover story: Bompas & Parr’s terrazzo tribute, AR Online, January 2017, Bompas & Parr
‘Bompas & Parr’s wobbly tribute to terrazzo on the cover of The Architectural Review draws together centuries of culinary and architectural tradition’
A cover history: 18 of the AR’s most striking covers, AR Online, May 2014, Jon Astbury
‘The first issue of the AR depicted the fictional muse of Architecture, cradling a building and guiding her sister muses forward’
Cover story: Arinjoy Sen’s woven carpet in the making, AR Online, November 2020, Ellen Peirson
‘In order to make space in a tangled, constricted world, other hands must undo the threads around them’
Cover story: Deane Hodgson’s collaged cityscape, AR Online, May 2023, Florence Wright
‘The varying stocks and ages of the papers create a sunset sky in a spectrum of yellows and pinks, from which the silhouette of a city emerges, its buildings cut from text, sketches and photographs’