The summer palace of Gustav III, but much older, built in the late seventeenth century to the designs of Nicodemus Tessin:-

I have been to Drottningholm once before, in 2005, for a performance of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Zoroastre. But I had forgotten how staggeringly well preserved the theatre is, how deeply atmospheric, the sense of walking back behind-the-scenes of the eighteenth century into its back rooms and performance spaces, the peeling wallpaper, the secret staircases:-

The stage:-

Behind-the-scenes:-

The wallpaper:-

The stage machinery:-

The view out into the park:-

I started the day of a Wren conference in the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford which I have been in only once before when it was being restored – a wonderful space with extraordinarily fine Grinling Gibbons woodwork, now cleaned of later paint:-

It was good preparation for the excellent paper by Mark Kirby on the extent of Wren’s role in the design of the church furnishings of five of the City Churches and whether or not he had inherited his father’s and uncle’s Laudian attitude to liturgy:  the answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is that there is no evidence of it;  he was working at speed and did what the rector and congregation wanted.

Strangely, it is the first time I have been asked to lecture on the Castle Howard mausoleum, a mere thirty three years after I published a book with a chapter, the key chapter of the book, on it.

I still find it a profoundly moving building – so considered, so resonant, so full of intent:-

I had the utmost pleasure giving a talk in Sir John Soane’s Dining Room/Library, a curious mixture, like so much of the house, of grandeur and intimacy, helped by the room being full, like an early nineteenth-century séance.

Before the talk, I was able to wander round his taut, reflective interiors, so full of objects, but all artfully arranged. Is it picturesque ? Or neoclassical ? A memory palace ? Or just a form of artful pandemonium ?

I happened upon Paul Lay’s appreciation of Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy which I think Michael Baxandall wrote as undergraduate lectures after spending many years writing Giotto and the Orators, a subtle condensation of his thinking. I didn’t know Baxandall was an enthusiast for county cricket. It’s possible. Also, it’s probably worth remembering that his father was Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, which I have always assumed must have influenced his turn to art history, even if he chose to ignore it.

https://engelsbergideas.com/book-review/michael-baxandalls-renaissance-ecstasy/?s=09

Of course, I was being dense when I wrote my previous blog about those who studied in the History Faculty Building, because one of them was Rowan’s older brother, Charles, who read History Part 2, and may well have been influenced by his experience of the History Faculty Building to dislike modern architecture. And Charles was a friend of Oliver Letwin, who read History, Part 1 and 2. So, perhaps there is a pattern to the building’s influence. But there were surely other influences at work in the 1970s response to high modernism.

I was intrigued by a tweet by Rowan Moore which says that ‘Unfortunately quite a lot of opinion formers studied history at Cambridge and their experience of Stirling’s building was all they needed to bash modern architecture forever’.

It’s true that Gavin Stamp read history Part 1 in 1968, the year the new History Faculty Building opened. I doubt he liked the experience because he was the most vigorous campaigner against the continued existence of the building.

Who else, I wonder, is Rowan referring to ? Did Clive Aslet also read History Part 1 ? Possibly. Alan Powers ? As it happens, all three have been vigorous supporters of much modern architecture, just not so much the pure, and somewhat dogmatic, modernism represented by the History Faculty Building.

I spent my first week at Cambridge working in the history faculty library. The chairs were not very comfortable and there was an uneasy feeling of being surveyed as one worked because the building was supposedly designed on the model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. I retreated at the first possible opportunity to the University Library (a modern building) which had open shelf access and the most lovely tea room in the basement. I can’t remember anyone actually using the History Library, apart for lectures, but we were very actively discouraged from attending them by our Director of Studies, so I didn’t.

Did it influence my attitude to modern architecture ? Maybe a bit. It did feel rather aggressively unconcerned with the users of the building, a formal construct which sat in the Sidgwick Site, but bore little relation to it. Of course, it was designed not long before its architect himself turned against modern architecture, employing Léon Krier in his office, a much more formidable opponent of modernism than any of us history graduates.

Others were deterred by the weather forecast from visiting Plas Cadnant on Bank Holiday Monday, so we were able to enjoy its steep dell nearly on our own:-