Hauser and Wirth has a beautiful exhibition of late work by Louise Bourgeois – very free, fluid and organic etchings, done at the end of her life, which look wonderful in the empty space of the galleries. We particularly liked a bronze half statuette combined with vegetal top:-
We came to see the gardens at Stourhead, which I have only ever seen in the summer and autumn, never in the pale light of winter. We dashed round, past the grotto and Pantheon and up to the Temple of Apollo.
The nymph of the grot:-
A river god:-
We have escaped pre-Christmas to stay in Durslade Farmhouse, the eighteenth-century house which Iwan and Manuela Wirth bought five years ago and have restored as a masterpiece of shabby chic:-
In the morning, I walked briskly across the nearby fields, up a hill, to Redlynch, which has an unexpected mid-eighteenth-century church, designed by Nathaniel Ireson and advertising a carol service on Thursday:-
The door to the Trinity Almshouses unusually was open, so I was able to have a closer look, ahead of the day when a tower block looms over it above Whitechapel Station (I realised there is already a postwar block of flats visible directly behind the seventeenth-century chapel). The land was donated by Captain Henry Mudd of Ratcliffe and the almshouses built for retired sailors (‘decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships’), designed by a man called William Ogbourne, a master carpenter who was knighted in 1727. They were charged 12 shillings a month:-
I walked for a change up the Limehouse Cut, the stretch of water which was cut between the Thames and the River Lea, following an Act of Parliament in June 1767. Much of it is nondescript, semi-industrial wasteland, now being developed for new housing (it is hard to believe that we have a housing crisis when you see the scale and extent of new housing development in Bromley-by-Bow).
This is where the Cut begins:-
Past The Mission:-
Continue reading
The streets of Stepney were looking ghostly in the pale winter light as I walked from the drycleaner to the farm.
The new London Hospital looks a bit sinister, sheathed in aluminium:-
I was asked to see the exhibition of work by Harry Pearce at Foyle’s Gallery on the fifth floor of their handsome new shop (designed by Lifschutz Davidson) on the Charing Cross Road. Harry as a partner of Pentagram has been responsible (brilliantly) for the corporate identity of the Royal Academy for the last five years – always clear, unobtrusive and attentive to the qualities and characteristics of type forms – and last year published a book of his photographs under the title, Eating with the Eyes (the title is a Japanese proverb), which have now been made very effectively into large-scale photographic prints, some by an artisan Neapolitan printer, showing details of street scenes and the materiality of surfaces and things from around the world. The display cases are by Daniel Weil.
After doing the book, he offered to design the book of my blog and has done so – I think – wonderfully, capturing the movement of the eye across the page and the sense of visual exploration, as well as an intelligent relationship of image to text.
The silence of the blog is not owing to an attack of the widespread influenza, just an overload of Christmas events which leaves little space for anything other than mince pies: the Royal Academy’s Annual Carol Service which I always enjoy and instils a very briefly holy mood; our annual party held jointly with the Evening Standard, for which see tonight’s Londoner’s Diary; and tonight, our annual staff party for which I always feel woefully underdressed, not having spent the last few days devising some fantastical costume, demonstrating the extreme artistic ingenuity and creativity of the RA’s staff. So, the only photographs I have to post are of the mist across St. James’s Park:-
We had an event tonight to commemorate Zaha Hadid; or, as it turned out, to commemorate her as a person, as an architect, and her legacy. A bit of the discussion revolved round whether or not, as she herself felt, she was a victim of misogyny: whether or not she would have been more successful if she had been a man. The only problem with this line of argument is that she was gigantically successful: much fêted and commissioned around the world, highly regarded from the time that she was a student at the AA, given international teaching appointments in the 1980s, the subject of discussion in the exhibition on Deconstructivism at MOMA in 1988, and awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2004. I remember her lecturing at a conference in Columbia University on a stage with Daniel Liebeskind in, maybe, 2003. She was no shrinking violet.
We went off to Rugby in search of the spirit of Thomas Arnold. Unfortunately, we should have checked to discover that the school term ended yesterday, so everything was very shut up, with no tours available. However, we were able to see Butterfield’s New Schools with his characteristic muscular polychromy (Butterfield was originally hired by the head boy in 1859 to design the raquets courts):-
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