The obvious corollary of looking back over 2023 is looking forward to 2024.

My biggest hope for 2024 is that Michael Gove will turn down the so-called Slab, a monster building project which is planned for the South Bank nearly next door to the National Theatre and opposite Somerset House. It will dwarf St. Paul’s.

The exhibition of models of the Warburg Institute opens at the Architectural Association on 18 January.  The book which accompanies it, already published, is excellent.

Only today, we were speculating whether and when the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo will finally open.  The Financial Times says February, but not definitely, an unusual way to open a museum.

Gavin Stamp’s posthumous book Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 is being published on 7 March.  Definitely something to look forward to.

The last volume in the revised second – sometimes third – editions of Pevsner will be published in June.  Staffordshire, as revised by the late Christopher Wakeling.  A heroic moment, marking the end of a seventy-three year project since the publication of two thin volumes on Cornwall  and Nottinghamshire in July 1951, with their brown-and-white, austerity covers designed by Hans Schmoller.  Price 3/6d.  ‘Well worth a place in your rucksack’, according to the Daily Mirror.

The new look Warburg Institute, revived and revamped by Haworth Tompkins, who proved their brilliance at the London Library, is due to open in September.

The big expansion and reconfiguring of the Frick Collection by Annabelle Selldorf is due to open in the autumn.

So, is the new LACMA designed by Peter Zumthor. What will the verdict be, nearly twenty years after the project began ?

If readers have suggestions of architectural things I should see or write about in my monthly column in The Critic, do please let me know.