I only saw bits of the Getty yesterday in flitting from building to building in between meetings, so wasn’t really able to take in the complex geometry of Richard Meier’s hilltop city, its separate buildings mirroring the different functions of the institution, and the vistas everywhere of the valley below. Banham was on the nine-person committee which selected Meier as architect in October 1984 (Stirling was in the last three):-
I should have said that I owe a deep debt of posthumous gratitude to Reyner Banham who I never met, although I heard him lecture with exceptional fluency about building technology (I mainly remember the bootlace tie). After his premature death, the Design History Society wanted to organise an annual commemorative lecture and I was the person who made the arrangements, which broadened my horizons and brought me into contact with Mary (née Mullett), his remarkable widow, who he married in 1946 and incidentally drew the maps for the Los Angeles book. The lectures were published by Jeremy Aynsley under the title The Banham Lectures: Essays on Designing the Future in 2009.
I took the opportunity of a long haul flight to Los Angeles (and standing in line for immigration) not just to finish Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, but to re-read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies which I probably first read when I visited LA in the mid-70s. I was surprised how well it had stood up as a way of writing about a city, as much a study in historical geography and sociology (he was writing for New Society at the time) as it was a conventional architectural history or, as it is remembered, a love letter to the city by a hitch-hiking professor in love with pop culture who was ideologically moving west.
I finished reading Notes from Walnut Tree Farm on the flight to Los Angeles and have now completed my crash course in the works of Roger Deakin: sad to realise that he died ten years ago aged 63, so should have had twenty more years at least of rambling, meditative, descriptive writing about Suffolk and other places – his jottings on trees, insect life, memories of his north London childhood, travels in his Citroen, and things seen. Of the Australian writer Eric Rolls, he says that he writes ‘in a series of anecdotes and portraits that accrete bit by bit into a whole picture’ and that ‘his technique is disobedient in the best sense, for being his own man when it comes to writing’. He might have been writing about himself.
I know Hyde Park much better than I do Kensington Gardens, so took the opportunity of the closure of Lancaster Gate underground station to explore the area round Queensway, including Kensington Gardens, damp, grey and atmospheric on a wet Saturday morning, and including a curious mix of its original formal geometry, as originally laid out by George London and Henry Wise of the Brompton Nurseries, enlarged by Henry Wise for Queen Anne, and then adapted by Charles Bridgeman for Queen Caroline between 1727 and 1731, with grand avenues leading to Kensington Palace, dogs and big rotting trees:-
For anyone who is interested in the fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I am attaching a link to the post I have written for the Apollo blog and which has just been published. It is similar to what I wrote at the weekend on my own blog, but with a touch more historical and other detail:-
I know I have written about Keeling House before, but I am posting some photographs I took of it on Monday which I hope demonstrate its utopian character (designed 1955) and crisp rectilinear geometry, a product of the care that Lasdun put into every aspect of its design to ensure a combination of privacy (every maisonette had its own balcony) and community. Lasdun wrote, ‘These were people who came from little terraced houses or something with backyards. I used to lunch with them and try and understand a bit more what mattered to them, and they were proud people’:-
Following my post about Hoxton, I have been trying to figure out more accurately the precise division between Hoxton and Haggerston, which were created as separate parishes out of Shoreditch in 1830. The problem seems to be that they are parishes, municipal neighbourhoods and, in the case of Hoxton, a state of mind. I had thought that the boundary lay north-south down the Kingsland Road, as suggested by the location of Haggerston Park and Haggerston School, but I’ve realised it could be east-west along the Regent’s Canal, as suggested by the names of the stations on the new Overground. Perhaps someone can enlighten me ?
To help confuse matters, I am adding (which I omitted from my previous post) the terracotta ornament on the building which was once the Shoreditch Electric Light Station, has the wonderful inscription E PULVERE LUX ET VIS on its façade, and is in Coronet Street, Hoxton:-
The last of my posts from what turned out to be a long walk on the last day of the Christmas holiday concerns the two great gasholders on the bend of the Regent’s Canal, just near Broadway Market. I received an email telling me – surprise, surprise – that they are likely to be demolished. The smaller one is the earlier, dating from 1866, designed by Joseph Clark, the chief engineer of the gasworks. The bigger one was added in 1889. They supplied gas to the Shoreditch gasworks, which in turn supplied gas for the street lighting of east London:-
I feel slightly badly that Hoxton has so few entries in my book – only one – whereas neighbouring Haggerston has seven. So, I went to explore it.
I had never seen St. John the Baptist, Hoxton, a Commissioner’s Church built in 1826 to a design by Francis Edwards, a pupil of John Soane, with fantastic Ionic capitals and very good iron railings:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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