By the way, if you are going to the Storehouse, we had a very delicious supper at a nearby Italian trattoria on the River Lea called Gotto.  I mention it because you’re not spoiled for choice, although they have shrewdly opened a branch of E5 Bakehouse on site.

Also, it took me only half an hour to get there from Green Park on the Mildmay line to Hackney Wick.  Easier than the walk across the park from Stratford.

Go if you can. 

Opens Saturday:-

It’s quite something:-

I have now done a bit more research about the planned redevelopment of the cinema.

It appears that there was a community consultation in October, but although we live only a few hundred yards away, we did not know about it. Those who attended say there were not many people there and the event felt stage managed. No doubt, it was.

There is helpful information online:-

https://www.genesisredevelopment.co.uk/

A new basement cinema is shown in the plans with a foyer on the ground floor. The street frontage makes efforts to conform to the previous frontage.

So, the big issue is the scale of the development and its effect on Bellevue Place. And how it relates to whatever happens on the Anchor Brewery site next door.

The campaign to save our local cinema is gathering momentum and Spitalfields Life has just posted the change.org petition.  I hope you might sign it.

The problem is that the cinema is the major local amenity.  It might not matter if it was being replaced by shops and restaurants and if one could be confident that there will be a cinema in the new development.  But the general feeling is that it will be without character, diminishing the neighbourhood:-

https://www.change.org/p/save-genesis-cinema

I was recommended to visit the Casa Carlo Mollino, which is indeed a memorable experience: an apartment which Mollino decorated, but didn’t live in, and his friends did not know of its existence when he died in 1973.  It might have been sold, but was taken on by an engineer, Aldo Vandoni, as his office, before being acquired and restored in 1999 by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari who maintain it as a shrine.

Mollino’s taste was idiosyncratic, highly eclectic and much influenced by his interest in the occult and surrealism:-

The slow train from Milan to Turin enabled me to finish Iain Pears’s moving description of the love affair between Francis Haskell, who comes across as a surprisingly nerve wracked academic, afflicted by all sorts of doubts about his sexuality and author of sixty volumes of diary held by the National Gallery, and Larissa Haskell, the charming, highly intelligent, assistant curator of drawings at the Hermitage Museum who had endured terrible privations during the Siege of Leningrad which she survived much more easily than he had the torture of Eton. 

I would have liked a little bit more about the milieu of King’s College, Cambridge as it was in the 1950s, but it gives a good sense of the nature of European museum and research culture at the time and a relationship of shared intellectual values across national borders.

Rather amazingly, since the last symposium of the Provenance Projected Project in Oslo, Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending have compiled an immense 272-page Dictionary based round all the key terms involved in the thinking round the project: from Acquisition to Weathering.  Yesterday, we heard about Authorship, Material, Renovation, Reconstruction and Postproduction.  They will be short essays on architectural themes and issues, due to be published by Hatje Cantz in late October.  An astonishing feat of systematic co-ordination, including a 23-page bibliography.  I have written the tale of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry under the rubric of Craft.

https://www.hatjecantz.com/products/83100-provenance-in-architecture?srsltid=AfmBOooqJWJtuPsQZjLl62ryThhwQapEoam_DJ7miGa-Ac9g61IrKaad

I paid a quick, pre-conference visit to S. Lorenzo, Guarini’s great church, designed and built between 1666 and 1687:-

A good place for a conference: a maison de plaisance with fine stucco work, taken over in 1859 as the Regia Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingenieri, before being taken over by the architecture faculty of the Politecnico di Torino.

This is the Room of the Lilies:-

The plasterwork decoration of The Golden Cabinet of the Flowers:-

And the Hunting Room, where the plasterwork is dated 1644:-