I sadly can’t go to the event on Tuesday to protest against the plans for the redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station (https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/10/29/save-liverpool-st-station-event/).  One of the problems about these big development schemes, as I discovered with the campaign to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, is that the forces involved are horribly unequal:  on the one side you have big developers who are able to pour money into legal fees and PR companies;  on the other you have private individuals who are compelled to devote huge amounts of time and energy to trying to fight the system.  I was also left with the a feeling that the way that the system is constructed leaves little scope for a public voice to be heard.  In the end approval for such projects lies with a planning inspector who comes in from Bristol and adopts a narrowly legalistic view which pays very little attention to, and is probably antagonistic towards, public opinion.  Then, occasionally, opinions are referred to the Secretary of State.  But who actually makes them ?  I have not forgotten that when the final decision was made on the Bell Foundry, the Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick, tweeted that it was a bad decision until it was pointed out that he had himself made it.

So, the plans for putting two huge new buildings designed by world famous architects directly on top of two historic Victorian listed buildings trundle their way through the system, while, as it happens, demand for office space is reduced, prices in the neighbourhood are dropping, working patterns have changed and even the City planners have changed their attitude towards development, probably too late.  So, these monstrosities may well be redundant by the time they have received planning approval – vast glass boxes plonked surreally on top of a surviving Victorian railway hotel.  Maybe in time they will themselves be listed as grandiose monuments to the follies of a forgotten early twentieth-century Tory government which destroyed so much of the character of historic London.

As it was:-

As it is planned to be:-

It was the second day of the conference to mark the 41st. anniversary of the foundation of the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design – or maybe it was the 40th. anniversary of the first cohort of students graduating.

The day was about current issues in the history of design: new ways of engaging audiences; the new galleries of the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Gothenburg; a new film about the Artists International Association; and sessions in the afternoon about decolonisation.

The evening was more nostalgic: Chris Frayling on the origins of the course – the closure of the circulation department, his interview by Iris Murdoch, the role of John Physick; Penny Sparke on the wonderful Gillian Naylor and Clive Wainwright; and John Styles on the support of the V&A curators. There have been 800 students since 1982 and they are in jobs all over the world – Paris, Alberta, M+ and, not least, in the V&A itself.

So, Roy Strong’s view that it would be good for the V&A to be involved in postgraduate teaching was right, although it was not quite as straightforward as was occasionally implied.

Today was the first day of a two-day conference to mark/celebrate/explore the changes in the writing and study of the history of design since the establishment of the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design in October 1982. The conference is called History of Design: Change over Time/Time for Change.

Paradoxically, the image which appeared on the screen in between papers was dated October 1984 (see above), perhaps taken from the first set of public seminars which started with one given by Jules Prown, who was referred to in the first paper as a key figure in the field of Material Culture.

Jeremy Aynsley gave a brilliant overview of the history of the subject, but also showed a picture of the 1984 student brochure, not the original one, which had been compiled at speed for the launch of the course in 1982.  It would be interesting to compare the two.  The 1982 version of the course was called ‘Design and Decorative Arts: History and Technique’, which institutionalised an adversarial relationship between the V&A and RCA and was abolished in 1984.

Having not kept in touch with the development of the subject since I left the V&A in 1994, two things struck me.

The first was the extent to which the course fertilised the V&A’s exhibition programme between 2000 and 2010 when Mark Jones was Director with a whole series of big ambitious survey exhibitions, including Paul Greenhalgh on Art Nouveau and Christopher Wilk on Modernism.

The second was the amazing and impressive diversification and internationalisation of the subject such that it now encompasses absolutely everything. I particularly liked the suggestion in three papers that it should be about touch, sound (the sound of a typewriter) and smell. Presumably taste as well.

https://literaryreview.co.uk/not-worth-a-can-of-soup

To my shame, I had never heard of Shane de Blacam, who won this year’s Architecture Prize at the Royal Academy last night and gave a charming, informative and beautifully illustrated account of the buildings he had designed as if for the first time.

He was trained at University College, Dublin and then went on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania which was obviously a good place to be in the late 1960s, not least because of the presence of Louis Kahn, with whom de Blacam worked as a project assistant on the Yale Center for British Art. He told a story which I had never heard that the first version of the project came out at $17 million (I think that was the figure, but wasn’t taking notes) but Paul Mellon refused to budge from the budget he had set of $14 million because he was annoyed by New Haven who had insisted on there being shops on the street (actually, a good thing). So, de Blacam was responsible for re-engineering the building to cost quite a lot less, which normally results in an impoverishment of the building’s character, but not at the YCBA with its luxurious use of white oak and concrete (Kahn died in 1974 and the building only opened in 1977, so quite a bit of the work at this stage must have been done by Anthony Pellecchia and Marshall Meyer who worked in Kahn’s office).

De Blacam then went back to teach at University College, Dublin which he was obviously brilliant at to judge by the number of his former students from Dublin who where in the audience, before setting up in practice with a colleague, the late John Meagher who had studied in Helsinki before working for Venturi Scott Brown, also in Philadelphia. I now realise that we were only shown a relatively small proportion of their projects, but they were without exception exceptionally interesting – beautifully drawn, carefully considered, an unusual mixture of modernism, but with declared, sometimes modern, historical references, including a recreation of Adolf Loos’s Karntner Bar at Trinity College, Dublin and much acknowledgement of Kahn and Asplund.

There was little indication of the dates at which the projects were done, so I have looked up when they were done (some are undated on their website).

This is a residential block inserted into the medieval part of Dublin, finished in 2000:-

This is the courtyard of the Cork Institute of Technology, completed in 2007:-

The Abbeyleix Library (2009):-

I hope it’s OK to have reproduced the photographs which are by Peter Cook.