I was very pleased to attend an event this evening to celebrate the award of the RIBA Gold Medal to Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, the opening of an exhibition of his practice’s work upstairs at the RIBA, and a film made by a member (or maybe ex-member) of his practice.

In the course of the evening and from a supplement to the RIBA Journal, I learned more about his and his office’s work.

His great grandfather was Sir George Anderson, a civil engineer based in Alexandria, and his father, Thomas Grimshaw, was an aircraft engineer. So, engineering is in the blood.

This is what he looked like as a child:-

He went to Edinburgh School of Art and then the AA in autumn 1962 where he was taught by Peter Cook, whose approach to architectural design gave him a 1960s conceptual freedom, and was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.

After leaving the AA, he went straight into private practice jointly with Terry Farrell, which was unusual for an architect of his generation, many of whom went to work in the public sector on housing schemes. One of his first projects was 125 Park Road, a semi-industrial building, more like an office building than an apartment block, which is now listed and where he and his family lived for its first six years.

The first time I remember being really impressed by his work was his building for the Financial Times, just east of the entrance to the Blackwell Tunnell, with its great gleaming presses rolling in the night.

Next was the new terminal at Waterloo, curvaceous and sleek, using the language of nineteenth-century engineering to dramatic effect. It ceased to be the terminal for Eurostar in 2007, but is now apparently again in use.

Throughout the film, he showed how influenced he has been by the great engineers of the nineteenth century – Paxton and Brunel; by the work of Charles and Ray Eames; and by an interest in the use of industrial components and the quality of industrial detailing.

It was a pleasure to see the consistency of his approach to projects large and small and his constant sense of humour, teamwork and self-deprecation.

Since visiting Cuddesdon last week, I have been trying to find out more about the architects of the (not at all distinguished) house that my parents lived in there. I remembered that the architects had designed an advanced modernist house in Dorchester-on-Thames and that one of them was the daughter of the owners of Beckley Park, a very beautiful Tudor house down a lane on the edge of Otmoor.

Their names were Julia Feilding and Donald Morrison, both now deceased. Julia only died last year and their Miesian house on stilts, overlooking Dorchester Abbey, has now been sold:-

I was pleased to have a chance to see the David Adjaye exhibition Making Memory properly, particularly in the light of Rowan Moore’s denunciation of his scheme for a UK holocaust memorial in yesterday’s Observer.

First is the Gwangju Reading Room, an amazing free concrete structure, designed to commemorate the students killed in a pro-democracy uprising in May 1980:-

Next, the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture (opened 2016):-

I don’t really agree with Rowan Moore’s criticism of the Holocaust Memorial because I’ve always found Victoria Gardens, which I walk through often, bleak and nondescript:-

Finally (or nearly finally) Adjaye is at work on a National Cathedral of Ghana:-

One of the pleasures of being a new recruit to the Design Museum’s curatorial committee is walking across Holland Park – a curious, but attractive piece of 1950s municipalisation, created from the grounds of Holland House, which was bombed in the early stages of the blitz and sold by Lord Ilchester to the LCC in 1952.

Holland House itself was a great Jacobean house, which became stronghold of the Whigs after Henry Fox acquired a lease on the house in 1749 and bought 200 acres of surrounding land in 1768.

This is what mournfully survives:-

It’s bounded by Holland Walk, down past the gardens of Aubrey House, and otherwise consists of shrub woodland and paths:-

And, to the south, RMJM’s Design Museum:-

One of the benefits of unpacking the boxes of old books that were sent from my office at the Royal Academy is that I discover things that I had long forgotten or thought lost. One of these is the catalogue of the exhibition Second Nature held at the design gallery 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo in 2008, which first introduced me to the possibilities and opportunities of immersive design, as later brilliantly demonstrated in Kate Goodwin’s exhibition Sensing Spaces (another exhibition catalogue which has emerged from the boxes). Second Nature was about beauty in nature and included an installation Clouds, which consisted of countless white fibres hanging from the ceiling. It was designed by Tokujin Yoshioka, whose forms cross over into fine art.

This morning’s reading should consist of a reading of the account by Nigel Taylor, the senior foundry man at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, of its closure (http://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/02/10/nigel-taylor-tower-bell-production-manager/). The Hughes, who owned it, had run out of the will to keep it going: the market for church bells is precarious; Whitechapel was not the easiest place to run an industrial operation; they were of retirement age; and their daughters did not want to take it on; so they accepted a very generous offer (said to be £5.1 million) from a local east end property developer on condition that they didn’t tell anyone until the sale had been completed. So, it was only after the sale that any of the historical agencies (Historic England, SPAB, HLF) were able to try to save it, which was arguably too late, because by then it had been sold on to Bippy Siegal, a New York venture capitalist for £7.9 million.

So, what is to be done ? In order for it to be turned into a hotel, which is what Siegal wants, Tower Hamlets has to allow change of use. In order to allow change of use, Siegal has to demonstrate that it can no longer operate as a bell foundry.

What Nigel Taylor perfectly demonstrates is that it can and should. There are two existing foundries happy and able to take it on as a foundry.

So, it will be scandalous if Tower Hamlets allows change of use and scandalous, too, that Historic England has not come out in public to object.

We went to the new production of Kát’a Kabanová last night at Covent Garden, directed by Richard Jones and designed by Antony McDonald: a wonderfully intense, pure two and a quarter hours of Moravian emotion, beautifully sung and performed by Amanda Majeski as Katĕrina on a beautifully minimal set, consisting mainly of a gyrating modernist bus shelter. I’m relieved to find that Rupert Christiansen agrees.

Peckwater Quad:-

And Tom Quad in the rain:-

I also went on a pilgrimage to see the Christ Church Picture Gallery, having an interest in, but inadequate recollection of, the way that Powell and Moya designed a set of well-judged, half subterranean, but daylit spaces under the Deanery garden in the late 1960s (it opened in 1968, paid for by a gift of £50,000 in October 1963 by Charles Forte).

Powell and Moya had previously been employed to design the Blue Boar Quad, squeezed alongside the walls of Blue Boar Street to the north of Tom Quad, a discreet, but effective intervention:-

The Gallery itself consists of two galleries – one small for early Renaissance paintings, one much larger for (mainly) later Italian paintings, with a print room on a half-level above. It’s clever because it’s both quite intimate, as befits an essentially eighteenth-century collection, but, at the same time, generously proportioned, with a long corridor acting as a spine and views out into the Deanery garden.

I had made an appointment to see the Bishop Edward King Chapel at Ripon College, Cuddesdon because it is an unusual attempt to solve the problem of a contemporary sacred space (I have rashly agreed to lecture on this topic in Salisbury in a fortnight’s time).

The brief was presumably how to create a sacred space for a relatively small, and unusual, congregation – the students of Cuddesdon Theological College, the traditionally élite seminary of the Anglican church (Robert Runcie was its principal before becoming Bishop of St. Alban’s). Niall McLaughlin was recruited as architect, then less well known than he has since become, not least through the publication of this building.

It’s a small-scale and quite intimate space, made special by a simple internal structure of over-arching roof trusses made out of pale, bleached wood – both simple and complex in a satisfying way and totally unornamented, relying for its effect on an appreciation of its harmonious method of construction, like a super-elegant piece of origami:-