A Hall for Hull; The Roman Singularity – modern classics

Trinity Square, Hull; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 
A handsome installation outside Hull Minster and a candy-coloured miniature cityscape both use the language of ancient forms to say something new

Rowan Moore
Sunday 8 October 2017 07.59 BST

Bubbling beneath the surface of contemporary architecture is a certain restlessness, a craving that this art form recover its art, its ability to stir, provoke, enthral, speak. Which also means that it should do so with complexity and contradiction, in different registers, like music, with nuance and wit as well as oomph – not, in other words, the depthless sugar rush of much that gets called “iconic”. And not its usual alternative, in the two-party system of architectural style: the careful, dutiful sobriety that at best can produce a subtle poetry of space but at worst is no more than managerial.