In my tentative ventures on to Twitter, I have had barely any response to any of my tweets apart for one yesterday about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.   I have known that for many years they have been candidates for the RIBA Gold Medal, because I have been asked to write in their support, but have been told (very forcefully) that there is absolutely no way that this will ever be allowed to happen.   Why the vehemence ?   I suppose it is partly that Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was one of the early death knells of doctrinaire modernism, because of its admiration for references to history and particularly mannerism (the qualities of complexity in its title).   And Learning from Las Vegas was in its own way equally, if not more significant in its timing and recognition that architecture has a semiotics.   But these ideological battles are now long ago.   Surely it is time to bury the hatchet and recognise their significance in architectural thought, independent of the politics surrounding the competition for, and design of, the Sainsbury Wing.

I have just heard on the radio the news of the death of Tessa Jowell, not especially surprising owing to her cancer, but very sad nonetheless. I don’t always admire politicians, but I did her, for a special quality of warmth, friendliness and empathy which is rare is anyone, let alone a politician.

As I set off early in the morning to be interviewed with Tacita Dean on the Today programne (went out live at 8.50 this morning), I was struck by the quality of the shadows on the wall under the shepherds’ hats from Dagestan:-

I was putting the finishing touches to an account I have written of the 1949 Summer Exhibition for the Paul Mellon Centre’s annual chronicle of the exhibition which is due to be published online later this month.   At the time that I wrote it, I did not know that John Rothenstein had reviewed the exhibition in The Tablet as Director of the Tate.   He was pretty dismissive, describing it as ‘one of the most dispiriting he remembered’, but, on the other hand, was full of admiration for the work of Winston Churchill.   His conclusion was that, ‘One thing, at least, is unambiguously apparent:  towards academic standards the selection committee show – I should rather say parade – an indifference which makes nonsense of the insistent claim of the Academy to represent “Tradition”‘.

Now that Johnnie Shand Kydd’s amazing group photograph of the majority of RAs lined up on the grand staircase of Burlington Gardens has been published by the Evening Standard, I hope it’s all right for me to document the amazing scene as they all lined up in the March cold:-

I have spent the last couple of days watching architectural photographers trying to work out how and where to photograph it in order to convey its essential characteristics and by chance this evening came across some photographs of its difficult, ornate, high Victorian, classical façade which I always think might as well be in Berlin as London:-

We had our first, all-staff meeting in David Chipperfield’s new, hemispherical lecture theatre in Burlington Gardens this morning.   At 7.45, the place was still under wraps, the leather seats by Bill Amberg still covered by plastic sheeting.   By 9.00, two hundred or so people were sitting in the steeply raked amphitheatre, individually visible because the space is daylit, like a Renaissance anatomy theatre, or as David Chipperfield thinks, like the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (he is lecturing there this Saturday).   It’s a very different experience from talking in a darkened lecture hall:  the sense of assembled, proximate faces, each of whom is in an unexpectedly individual relationship with the speaker.   I still can’t post photographs, but will soon.

There are ten days till our building opens to the public.   I took a stroll round it last night, admiring the cleaned façade in the evening sun:-

I now know when the film about the Royal Academy is going out on television – this Saturday at 9 p.m. and thereafter available on i-player.   Having digested it and heard many comments, I can strongly recommend it as a view behind-the-scenes of the RA and how it operates:-

We walked out to the beach at Winchelsea, all shingle, to the Mary Stanford Lifeboat House, unused since its crew went out to save a Latvian boat in the English channel in the early hours of 15 November 1928, the boat capsized and all seventeen were lost.   The lifeboat house has not been used ever since:-