I am re-posting the attached admirable blog post on architectural education by Hana Loftus as a way of preserving it and, I hope, giving it wider exposure because it says so much not just about the nature of architectural education, but also about what is valued and esteemed by architects themselves: often too much about machismo showing off than intelligent and thoughtful design. Maybe it is already changing, but it certainly needs to change:-

http://virtualhana.blogspot.com/2022/07/on-architectural-academia.html?m=1&s=09

As a coda to my last post, it is surely worth remembering that the last time the Conservative Party performed this exercise, they managed to select someone who was absolutely brilliant at making up policy on the hoof and charmed all those tories in the shires and on their golf courses, but turned out to be absolutely hopeless at government and that almost everything he said was horseshit.

So, the one thing these debates make me think is that it could be good to have a Prime Minister who seems to be universally regarded as decent, but dull, as if this is a terminal handicap to his chances, but at least he might have the virtue of thinking before he speaks.

As a distraction from COVID, we have been watching the leadership debates.

I’m afraid that my principal emotion is one of despair that the choice of the next Prime Minister is reduced to a one-hour game show in which each of the contestants is required to answer big questions about the future of the country in sound bites, preferably with cheap shot jibes at the other candidates, all of whom are party colleagues and most of whom, apart from Tom Tugendhat, have been in government and so bear some degree of collective responsibility for the gigantic mess they are promising to extract us from, so come across as profoundly ill-equipped to solve the problems with the wave of their two-minute wand.

Oh, and I like Kemi Badenoch who comes across as smart and shrewd and plain-talking which can’t be said of at least two of her colleagues.

But then I don’t have a vote, so my views are worthless.

The truth is that I sometimes forget that there are quite a number of people – all friends – who read my blog, so I have been grateful for so many kind messages from all over the world including this morning from Tasmania and Japan.

It is possible that someone from the NHS reads it as well because not long after my last post I got a very helpful call from the Covid Unit at Mile End Hospital where we are going this morning. So the system does work, if sometimes a bit creakily.

Just to reassure the many kind people who have emailed to ask how Romilly is: the truth is, so far, so good. We are sitting in the back garden in the sun and this version of Covid seems perfectly survivable.

I suppose it was inevitable that one of us would get COVID at some point. There is so much of it about and no-one, including us, has been taking any precautions, although I have continued as an act of symbolic and increasingly eccentric obstinacy to wear a mask in the tube, a symbol to myself that it is not all over yet. In fact, it is Romilly who has got it, not me (so far), although in all likelihood I will. She is ultra high risk and I still worry that it will get worse or she will choke in the night and that will be it. They have been promising a fourth vaccination, but it keeps being promised – since February I have discovered; and she was promised access to a special drug, but we still await its delivery. What one realises – well, it’s obvious – is that we have all willed COVID to go away and have pretended it has, but it has been an act of the most tremendous wishful thinking, like so much of contemporary politics.

A new linen suit arrived in the post, just in time for the next heat wave. The packaging commemorates the fact that this year is the thirtieth anniversary of Old Town Clothing, the sustainable clothes shop in Holt, Norfolk, where you just ring up and another excellent piece of clothing arrives – not cheap, but they last forever. I still have, and wear, the clothes I bought soon after they opened in a shop in the old town of Norwich before moving out to Holt. They do no advertising. It’s just word-of-mouth (www.old-town.co.uk). After thirty years of pleasure in what they make, I salute them !

We went to hear Christopher Le Brun talk about his recent work done during lockdown and currently on display in the beautiful spaces at Lisson Gallery: perhaps darker and more meditative than his recent work; in the case of the impressive big picture, The Waves, an assembly of panels like an abstract version of a polyptych – purely abstract and apparently based on musical intervals.

He spoke of the long tradition of English painting, stretching back to Turner and Constable, but I was wondering how it related to the teaching at the Slade in the late 60s/early 70s: Patrick George and Euan Uglow against American abstraction and Tess Jaray.

Off to Hatfield. Quite a treat. Not just the powerful sense of dynastic history, but the quality of the paintings, library, manuscripts and, which I’d forgotten, the Jacobean woodcarving in nearly every room.

I will start with the Rainbow portrait in the Marble Hall, partly because I have been reading about Roy Strong’s first encounter with portraits of the Queen, the subject of his first book (1963):-

Upstairs in the King James Drawing Room is the Ermine Portrait, attributed to Hilliard:-

The wood carving in the Marble Hall is apparently by John Bucke, but of widely different quality and character:-

Then, there is good wood carving on the Grand Staircase:-

The rest of what I photographed is more miscellaneous – just things which randomly caught my eye:-

It’s a feast !

I am very in favour of the Museum of London’s move to Smithfield. The existing building is, as the accompanying article makes clear, tricky to access, sited on a roundabout, and essentially a big, deep, two-story box, once you have navigated your way into it. But this doesn’t mean that it should necessarily be demolished as the City currently plans.

It’s a tricky and very sensitive site on the edge of the Barbican and anything that is done there is likely to affect views from and to the Barbican. From what I have seen of the plans by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, they look over-scaled and out of character, as presented in CGIs. It’s surely a pity that the building can’t find an alternative cultural use, either under the wing of the Barbican or independently. Could it not be added to the plans by Allies and Morrison for what happens to the Barbican, so that there is an integrated approach to the cultural development of the City ? It belongs to the Barbican both culturally and architecturally.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jul/11/museum-of-london-plans-epic-leaving-do-before-moving-out?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other