If you want to learn about the work of the Factum Foundation, which was heavily involved in the attempt to preserve the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, I strongly recommend the attached, quite long, but wide-ranging conversation between Richard Delmarco and Ferdinand Saumarez Smith which explains the nature of its work and historical interest:-

I have been trying to figure out what has happened at Liverpool Street.  It appears that Network Rail have dumped their partnership with Sellar as developers and Herzog & de Meuron as architects in favour of working directly with a big local architectural practice, ACME, based very near Liverpool Street in Tabernacle Street (this surely is an advantage).

So, who are ACME ? They were set up in 2007 by Friedrich Ludewig who came to London from Berlin to study at the Architectural Association with Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo and then worked with them on the John Lewis building in Leicester.

His practice has done a strange miscellany of projects internationally, including big masterplanning in Earls Court, but that is perhaps to be expected for a younger practice seeking work internationally.  Their projects include an interesting housing project on the edge of the City and the pavilion which opened recently as the gateway to the Olympic Park.  They have also done an organic food market in Wiesbaden.

What they are proposing looks definitely better than the crackpot Herzog and de Meuron scheme:-

1. They are protecting the integrity of the Victorian Great Eastern Hotel instead of building on top of it.
2. They are obviously celebrating the original ironwork of the train sheds which are indeed wonderful.
3. They have somehow inserted two tower blocks which are apparently necessary to pay for the development.

I could live without the cauliflower on top of the tower blocks and the tower blocks themselves look bland; and I suspect there is considerable loss to the unlisted 1980s additions; but overall it looks as if they are at least trying to do something interesting and adventurous having been given a very tricky brief.

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/controversial-liverpool-street-station-redevelopment-dropped-in-favour-of-new-design-76808/

We went to Daquise for lunch, half way through our visit to the wonderful Great Mughals exhibition at the V&A.  It is one of those places that one assumes will always be there because it feels as if it has always been there, at least since 1947 when it was opened by Mr. Dakowski and his wife Louise.  It has been poshed up a bit since I used to go there for lunch in the 1980s, but my veal meatballs looked unexpectedly familiar.

Now, of course, it’s at risk of redevelopment.  The Rogers Stirk Harbour scheme which has been rumbling through planning approval forever is going ahead, so all that remains of the attractively seedy underground station and its surroundings, the remainder bookshop and no doubt Daquise, will be eradicated.

But it should really have a preservation order as a monument to the role of the Poles in post-war British culture when retired Polish generals could be spotted in Daquise playing chess.

https://www.standard.co.uk/going-out/restaurants/restaurant-review-daquise-b1187019.html

I have been expecting there to be more obituaries of Joseph Rykwert, so was pleased to read the very well-informed one by Rowan Moore in yesterday’s Guardian which gives a very good sense of his widespread influence, as much through his personality as his writing:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/nov/04/joseph-rykwert-obituary

I went to an exhibition in the Czech Embassy, so was able to see what was originally the administrative part of the building, now the Slovak Embassy, from their shared garden, both of them fine and well preserved examples of 1960s brutalism designed by three Czech architects, Jan Bočan, Jan Šrámek and Karel Štěpánský, all of it perfectly preserved:-