I have now had a chance to read Moneo’s lecture in its elegant, printed form and to confirm what I had half realised:  that Moneo compares the contemporary loss of faith and belief in the tenets on the Modern Movement and the move away from the Vitruvian concepts of firmitas, utilitas and venustas to a belief in technological suprematism alone (or anything goes) is paralleled by Soane’s situation at the end of his life:  ‘It is a situation not very different to that of Sir John Soane, when, at the end of his life, from his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he could see that the architectural canon and the language of Classicism were no longer valid and that the new world of architecture was something he wouldn’t recognise’.

I went to hear Rafael Moneo give what was described as the first Soane annual lecture at the Royal Institution, although I thought I had a shelf-ful of earlier ones in the Soane section of my library, and receive the Soane Medal, a replica of the medal that Soane was given in 1835 by ‘the Architects of England’.    It felt like a manifesto, deeply felt and dense with historical references.   There were two things which I will particularly remember.   The first was the way in which Moneo described Soane in the early 1830s at the end of his career mourning the loss of faith in the classical tradition as a younger generation began to experiment with radical pluralism: ‘Soane, who had shown his profound love and respect for Rome in the design of his own home, and his passionate collecting of classical antiquities, was conscious, perhaps with a certain melancholy, that he would represent the end of the deeply nostalgic English architecture that had taken the Eternal City as its inspiration since the time of Inigo Jones’. The second was the extent to which David Chipperfield, who was master of ceremonies and engaged Moneo in questions after the talk, so obviously admired Moneo for his compromise between modernity and the reference to history. He did an exhibition of Moneo’s work in his 9H Gallery in 1986, just at the time of the completion of the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida. It showed the route out from postmodernism, a belief in the more cerebral, as well as material, qualities of building.

I went last night to a discussion about the characteristics of cities in the 2020s which took place under Chatham House rules.   I hope that I am not breaching them by saying that much of the discussion was about the need for devolution and the involvement of the local community if the housing crisis is in any way to be solved;  and that Brexit is likely to make this impossible, because, not least, it involves far too much of the energies of the current government.   One statistic particularly stuck in my mind, which is that in London, 80% of the housing being built is affordable to only 8% of the population:  hardly the way to solve the crisis.

And I enjoyed the staggering view south of central London:-

And of New Zealand House close to:-