Over the last year, architectural historians have been exercised about the future display and availability of the RIBA drawings collection.  In my article in the current issue of The Critic, I have tried to explain the background to this concern.

The RIBA is now trying to figure out where and how its drawings collection should be stored.  I feel that one obvious possibility could be as part of the Barbican’s plans for its future development or in Smithfield Market when the traders move out.  Or Bastion House.

Helsinki has just launched a competition for an Architecture Museum.  Other cities have one.  Why not London ?  It should not have to be the responsibility of the RIBA on its own.

https://thecritic.co.uk/whither-the-ribas-drawings/

A very beautiful collection of objects on display in the gallery at the back of Hauser & Wirth in Savile Row if you happen to be passing:-

https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/kunstsilo-art-gallery-norway

I spent the day enjoying, examining and thinking about the Kunstsilo – a new cultural project on the dockside in Kristiansand created out of a converted 1935 modernist grain silo, which has been cut in half to create a cultural atrium and then has had wings attached containing galleries. 

This is the building from the harbour:-

The inside is a magnificent raw industrial space:-

I particularly admired the invention of the staircases:-

I have just been sent Ptolemy Dean’s excellent and admirably clear account (see below) of the renovation of Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s which is itself now an integral part of the history of the station, done with sensitivity following the battle to save the station in the 1970s.

It seems so strange that this battle should have to be fought all over again, as if nothing has been learned.  And that Network Rail is so impoverished that they cannot afford to put in proper disabled access without selling off the air space over the station.  And that Herzog & de Meuron should lend their international architectural authority to such a horrible scheme.

My introduction to Kristiansand was dinner locally in Boen Gård, an early nineteenth-century house, now a hotel.  These are the outbuildings:-

The meal was sensational, each course introduced and described in loving detail – a performance.  Highly recommended if you happen to find yourself in southern Norway.

A long plane journey to Kristiansand in southern Norway meant that I was able to finish Sylvia Brownrigg’s remarkable memoir/detective story, The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found.  I remember her telling me the gist of it: that a package of papers addressed to her father by her grandmother had been found in the basement of her family’s house in Los Angeles, which enabled her to uncover elements of her father’s side of the family previously unknown, including the circumstances of her grandfather’s death – was it suicide ? – in Kenya.  It is about the complexities of family life.  Did it help that I know some of the people described ?  Not necessarily.  It’s about generational dinsinterment and the lost story of her father who scarcely knew or met his father and her rediscovery of it all from the package.

We went to the Eileen Agar/Emma Witter exhibition at Bosse & Baum in Peckham: a good and appropriate juxtaposition:-

I went yesterday to the new Tony Cragg exhibition at Castle Howard: many of his sculptures beautifully placed in the landscape, enhancing the vistas in unexpected ways; particularly a beautiful work on the empty basin in the middle of Ray Wood:-

There is an amazing assembly of glass vessels in the Temple of the Four Winds:-

And in the Great Hall, the work echoes and encourages one to look carefully at Giovanni Bagutti’s plasterwork overmantel:-

It is not the first time that I have seen and admired Giovanni Bagutti’s beautiful plasterwork chimneypiece in the Great Hall at Castle Howard, but it still repays close attention for the fluidity of its decoration – the shell work and scrolls.  It’s astonishing, particularly for its date:-