Toynbee Hall was an appropriate place for the launch of the new two volumes devoted to Whitechapel which have been in gestation since 2015, helped by a brilliant interactive website which contains all the information in the two volumes and more besides; but the official publication in hard covers still gives a sense of scholarly authority and finality to the enterprise, as well as an opportunity to see Whitechapel as a whole instead of as a series of individual places.

It’s good that it’s been done as the area has been subject to such an amazing amount of change: coming out of the west entrance of Aldgare East, one is faced by a new American city with scarcely any vestige of what was there before, including even the street layout. But I presume that the process of change is all now meticulously recorded.

The original hall opened in January 1885, designed by Elijah Hoole – ‘a manorial residence in Whitechapel’:-

Next door is a discrete intervention – I think by Richard Griffiths, but the Survey is less good on the new than the old:-

Beyond is the new town, stamping out any sense of history:-

I’m so pleased to see that the Gentle Author has written about Grayson Perry’s Covid Bell on display in the Summer Exhibition as a reminder that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry could – and indeed still could – have been turned into a working foundry if only Historic England had supported the proposal to keep it as a Foundry instead of turning into a boutique hotel: something which now looks unlikely to happen, so Historic England have effectively substantially contributed to its current dereliction.

It would be wonderful if a bell could be installed in the new public garden being created immediately next door to the London Hospital as a public memorial. Or, a possible alternative. Could one go into the new Tower Hamlets Town Hall due to open this autumn ?

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/06/21/grayson-perrys-end-of-covid-bell/?s=09

Although I thought I was pretty familiar with the secondary literature on the Sainsbury Wing, I happened on a lecture which Bob Venturi gave at the Royal Society of Arts just the week before the designs were made public which provides an absolutely excellent and exceptionally clear description of his approach to museum design. It includes the following paragraph, which is a particularly succinct summary of his views:-

When you enter the museum you might wonder, are you in a museum or an airport ?  And by the time you reach the art, you are either worn down by the banality of the maze you have traversed, or jaded by the drama of the spatial, symbolic or chromatic fantasies the architect has ejaculated you through.   The art, when you reach it, has become a kind of anti-climax — in fact, dull as you perceive it with your, by then, constricted pupils, jaded sensibilities, and loss of orientation.[1]

This, I realise, is a good argument for not trying to be too adventurous in how the entrance hall is treated under the currently planned revision by Annabelle Selldorf, but trying to keep it as a cool, calm space without too obvious or assertive an architectural character.

[1] Robert Venturi, ‘From Invention to Convention in Architecture’, Journal of the Royal Society if Arts, Vol. 136, January 1988, p. 92.

I have only just caught up with Rowan Moore’s careful analysis of some of the problems and issues surrounding the Sainsbury Wing, whose redevelopment is considerably complicated by the fact that it is a building of such exceptional historical importance, but possibly more admired for its intellectual ingenuity than loved, apart from the wonderful top floor galleries.

My own view is that its entrance was compromised from the beginning by the fact that Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were not allowed to design the furniture and fittings themselves, so the gallery instead commissioned Venturi pastiche; half the entrance was chopped off to make a bookshop of an entirely different character; and over time it accumulated a lot of extra desks which meant that the original design was no longer legible. The passage from darkness into light, a characteristic of a Renaissance church (both Venturi and Scott Brown spent time in Rome in the early 1950s), and the more baroque feature of a grand escalier are, rightly or wrongly, no longer regarded as appropriate ways of approaching the experience of a great museum. So, some level of rethinking and redesign was necessary.

Annabelle Selldorf has sensibly opened the entrance space up to give it more height. She would be condemned if she tried to imitate Venturi and Scott Brown (Scott Brown herself is anti-pastiche) and she may now equally be criticised by Rowan Moore and others for being too polite. It’s a nearly impossible task.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/19/the-sainsbury-wing-redesign-spare-us-the-art-world-good-taste

We also went to Kew Palace as well as the Herbarium. I haven’t been since it was totally overhauled by Historic Royal Palaces in 2006 – we thought very successfully with much new fabric, but enough kept of the original, and good quality, straightforward description of the use of the rooms, much of it unexpectedly moving in telling the story of George III’s incarceration on the ground floor, with Queen Charlotte and his daughters all upstairs, joining him poignantly for supper each evening.

Upstairs, there was a recording of Handel’s Sarabande in D Minor, a way of recollecting how poor mad George would console himself by playing alone on the harpsichord:-

Quite an amazing performance by Ruby Hughes at King’s Place tonight: most of all, Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations, a song cycle first performed in 1940 – a work of such great and varied intensity, even ferocity – ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’. Also, settings by Edmund Finnis of poems by Alice Oswald and ‘Che is può fare’ by Barbara Strozzi. All of it unknown – to me, at least – and revelatory. Not to forget the Manchester Collective who were the performers alongside her.

We were initiated into the mysteries of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew by seeing its Herbarium on a special behind-the-scenes visit: an extraordinary archive of dried plants collected from round the world and then stored, including a special collection transferred from the Linnaean Society. I have seldom experienced such a strong sense of global taxonomic knowledge:-

And the plants themselves:-

We went into Kew’s tropical greenhouses, an extraordinary experience: travelling to Madagascar and Brazil through their plants and vegetation:-

We started with orchids:-

Then to a greenhouse devoted to Bromeliads:-

Then, Cacti:-

Melano-cactus:-

Euphorbia:-

Carnivorous plants:-

A few weeks ago, I took myself off to explore the former Olympic Village, north of Stratford. I formed a very negative impression of its anonymity as a model of recent town planning, so was encouraged (quite rightly) to take a walking tour today organised by Allies and Morrison, the architects who did much of the planning of Olympic Park from 2005 onwards. Of course, it helps to know more about the historical process of planning and design and how decisions were made about the layout of the park and who did what.

Olympic Village itself was laid out on the European model: broad boulevards and big apartment blocks, the Corbusian model of town planning:-

Immediately north of what is now called East Village is an area of new development, Chobham Manor, laid out more on the London model, with terrace housing designed by Haworth Tompkins, less anonymous and with a different feel:-

Also, it helps to see behind the big blocks where some of the design is smaller scale and more varied:-

I still prefer the grittier bits of Olympic Park next door to Hackney Wick because it is rougher and less manicured, some of it designed (or un-designed) by muf:-

This is the new Stratford. More tower blocks. But the park itself is good, especially, I realised, the northern half towards the Velodrome which is wilder and has a different character:-

For anyone interested in the nature of architectural education, the attached seems like a pretty measured and illuminating critique of one person’s experience of life at the Bartlett.

On twitter, there is a comment that non-architects should not have the temerity to get involved in this discussion. It’s for architects only. But this seems to be at the core of the problem. Architecture is a public art, requiring a sense of its wider, public responsibilities, not a private indulgence.

Besides, the issues are important in other areas of education as well, not just architecture.

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/opinion/bartlett-report-sheds-much-needed-light-on-our-professions-wider-failings/5117931.article?s=09