It looks pretty clear that there is a big battle going on over the future of the Bevis Marks Synagogue and its access to natural daylight. On the one side, you have the City’s planning department and councillors, determined to have their way, who maintain that, post-COVID, you must have development at all costs, as big and brash as can be. There don’t seem to be enough people on the other side questioning this strategy. I have been twice recently to meetings in big City law firms. They have been totally deserted. It looks to me at least possible that people will decide that it is nicer to work as much as possible from home and not in some bleak inhospitable 68-floor monster surrounded by other monsters in an area where history and culture and human memory have been effectively eradicated. A bit of me hopes this happens to demonstrate the penalties of greed.

https://www.cityam.com/city-of-londons-planning-processes-questioned-in-fight-to-save-uks-oldest-synagogue/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&s=09

Having recently re-read the secondary literature on the Sainsbury Wing, my own included, and seen the extent to which Robert Venturi is credited with it and not the firm of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown jointly, I was pleased to read the attached long and thoughtful discussion as to how their collaboration worked from when they first met in Philadelphia in 1960, to her invitation to him to come and visit her in Los Angeles which is when they first travelled out to see Las Vegas to her pioneering work on the preservation of South Street, Philadelphia in 1968 and their joint work on Learning from Las Vegas. It documents the atrocious way she was treated on the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, most of all by Colin Rowe. It’s a bit shocking to read it.