No sooner had I returned from my visit to the Warburg’s exhibition at the Architectural Association than I was sent a link to a project by the Factum Foundation to recreate digitally the statue of the Hermes Kriophoros which was lent by the Earl of Pembroke and used to stand in the Warburg’s entrance hall (The Statue: A Wilton-Warburg ‘Kriophoros’ | The Warburg Institute (sas.ac.uk)).

It is planned that the replica should stand in an equivalently prominent position in the new entrance hall which is expected to open in September, reconfigured as part of the admirable project, led by Bill Sherman as the Institute’s Director and with Haworth Tompkins as architects, to renovate the building as a whole. 

Here is the ground plan of the reconfigured ground floor which will have a new lecture theatre at its symbolic heart:-

If you want to support the project, this is the link (Resurrecting the Ram-Bearer: The Wilton-Warburg Kriophoros Restoration Campaign | The Warburg Institute (sas.ac.uk)). It’s a very good cause. 

I revisited the exhibition at the Architectural Association which demonstrates the changing form of the Warburg Institute, originally housed in luxury in a suburb of Hamburg, next door to Warburg’s house (the exhibition closes March 7):-

Then briefly in Thames House on Millbank in a layout designed by Godfrey Samuel of Tecton:-

Then, from 1937 to 1958, in the Imperial Institute:-

Finally, in Woburn Square:-

It tells one a lot about the relationship between a library, the nature of reading, and the history of ideas.

Otto SS has sent me the attached advert for the Bell Foundry with a nicely abstracted view of the bells of Liverpool Cathedral, installed in the 1930s. The Bell Foundry tends to be associated with historic bells – the city churches, St. Paul’s, the Liberty Bell, Big Ben. It’s nice to see an image of its twentieth-century incarnation.

Factum Foundation is making bells – but not at the Bell Foundry because Historic England thought it was more exciting for the Bell Foundry to be turned into a boutique hotel than remain a Bell Foundry.

It’s what they call ‘adaptive re-use’. The only problem is that the boutique hotel hasn’t happened. So, they have allowed – and indeed encouraged – a historic building to decay, not what I regard as their statutory function.