I spent yesterday at Frieze Masters with the vetting committee for Sculpture and Works of Art.   It was a pleasure looking closely at objects with a group of museum experts, starting with Sam Fogg’s medieval gallery, including a fine Spanish 11th. Century capital:-

A marble relief of Augustus thought to be by Mino da Fiesole:-

And a wonderful Nottingham alabaster:-

Hauser and Wirth have got a stand reconstructing the tastes and artistic interests of Stephen Spender, including drawings of him by Henry Moore and Hockney, and very beautiful works by Frank Auerbach:-

Georg Laue has a beautiful late medieval Crucifixion:-

And a remarkable late seventeenth-century ivory relief:-

Finally (at least, for today), a German seventeenth-century Crucifixion:-

Having spent much of the day at Frieze Masters, I thought I should pay my respects to Nicholas Grimshaw’s Sainsbury’s in Camden Town, one of his first big projects in London and still with more than a hint of Utopian modernism, particularly in the tubular housing on the Grand Union Canal behind, as expressively modern as any housing before or since.

The street front:-

And the view from the canal:-

In writing about the Burlington Fine Arts Club last night, I realised that it used to occupy one of the more interesting and unusual houses on the west side of Savile Row – originally built as part of Lord Burlington’s development of the streets north of Burlington House and then somewhat Egyptianised in the early nineteenth century when it was lived in by George Basevi, the pupil of John Soane, who spent three years studying in Rome, and was later responsible for the design of Belgrave Square and the Fitzilliam Museum. Oddly enough, before it became the Burlington Fine Arts Club, it was lived in by Dr. Richard King, a surgeon and Arctic explorer who founded the Ethnological Society of London:-

Nicholas Thomas, one of the co-curators of Oceania, mentioned that objects from the Pacific Islands were included in an exhibition of ‘The Art of Primitive Peoples’ held by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in their premises at 17, Savile Row, in 1935.   I was intrigued.   The Burlington Fine Arts Club was a private club which devoted itself to holding small-scale specialist exhibitions, mainly of Old Master paintings, prints and Chinese ceramics, but in the 1920s and 1930s, they branched out, beginning with an exhibition of ‘Objects of Indigenous American Art’ in 1920 and a broader representation of artefacts by what were still described, anachronistically, as Primitive Peoples in 1935.   The loans came not just from the holdings of the dealer, William Oldman, sold in 1948 to the New Zealand government, but also, as Thomas mentioned, from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.   One of its curators was Adrian Digby, who had joined the Department of Oriental Antiquities and Ethnography in 1932 and helped establish the Museum of Mankind before his retirement in 1969.

I am now posting, rather belatedly, the photographs I took of Romilly’s display at Goldsmith’s Hall, which was on all last week:-

I realised in writing about the award of the RIBA Gold Medal to Nick Grimshaw how little I knew about his work before his great Printing Works opened on the East India Dock Road in 1988, with the huge presses of the Financial Times visible as one drove past in the night.   The reason, I realise, is that much of it is outside London, out-of-town factories and corporate headquarters, done with a fine attention to materials, detail and engineering, much of it when he was working, so improbably, in partnership with Terry Farrell:  a warehouse for Citroën in Runnymede done in 1972;  the Headquarters for Editions Van de Velde in Tours in France, completed in 1975;  the Herman Miller factory in Bath (1976), now being turned into a design school for Bath Spa University;  factory units in Warrington (1978);  headquarters for BMW in Bracknell (1980) (this was the year the partnership split);  a factory in Nottingham (1980);  a Sports Hall for IBM (1980);  a factory for Vitra in Weil-am-Rhein (1981);  Wiltshire Radio Station (1982);  the Herman Miller Distribution Centre (1982);  the Oxford Ice Rink (1984).   It’s a big body of work, but without any of the very high profile projects which brought earlier fame and the Gold Medal to Norman Foster, who won it in 1983, and Michael and Patty Hopkins in 1994.

Sean Scully has an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with a small group of recent paintings in its Longside Gallery and sculptures in the grounds, including Moor Shadow Stack outside the gallery:-

Wall Dale Cubed, a monumental limestone construction:-

And, finally, Crate of Air, a big Corten steel work:-

For some reason, I have never been to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, even in the days when, as Bretton Hall, it was home of the New Arcadians, a group of scholars, including Patrick Eyres, who were interested in the symbolism of the eighteenth-century landscape garden.

The original eighteenth-century house was designed by Sir William Wentworth, its owner, with the possible help of Colonel James Moyser, a fellow landowner, and poshed up by William Atkinson in 1805:-

In 1978, Peter Murray, a lecturer at the college, established the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in its grounds. It’s an impressive and lively operation, with sculpture sited in the grounds:-

Having complained recently that the RIBA had failed to honour Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, I’m delighted to discover that this year’s Gold Medal has been awarded to Nick Grimshaw, my former President at the Royal Academy.   My own view is that he deserves it not just for his early hi-tech work, which is now justly celebrated, including the fine Financial Times printworks (1988), no longer used as a visible print works, but recently listed, his astonishing houses on the Grand Union Canal (1988), and the snaking engineering of his Waterloo International Terminal (1993), but also for his less well known international work, including the wonderful Southern Cross Railway Station in Melbourne (2005) and his Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York (2007).   He will be eighty next year and has been in practice for over fifty years.   I salute him !

A week or so ago, I was asked to contribute to a symposium organised by MJP, the architectural practice which used to be known as MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (in the 1980s & Wright). I found it interesting to reflect on MacCormac’s attitude to both history and postmodernism and my contribution to the event has now been published online:-

http://www.architecturetoday.co.uk/was-maccormac-postmodern/