We had the first of the Rothschild Foundation’s annual lectures last night, given by Demis Hassabis, a wunderkind of the artificial intelligence world, early chess champion, inventor of Theme Park, an internationally important computer game, when he was 17, before reading computer science in Cambridge and doing a PhD. on cognitive neuroscience.   He talked about how far the new generation of computers has developed creativity, based on the contrast between the first generation computer which was able to beat a world champion at chess and the next generation which could develop unexpected and counter-intuitive moves at Go, a more complicated game not susceptible to mere mechanical memory of moves.   He went on to show the way artificial intelligence can be applied to medicine – easy to see – and art – maybe less obvious, because art is not the product of any underlying systematic order.   But he certainly made it clear that the world is going to change as machines radically outpace the capabilities of humans in so many spheres.

Following my post yesterday about Denise Scott Brown and her article ‘Room at the Top ? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture’, written in 1975 and not published till 1989, I have been trying to find out more about her career, separately from the work she did jointly with her husband, Bob Venturi, after they met at Penn in 1960.   I had not realised that she worked under Frederick Gibberd in the early 1950s when she arrived in London from South Africa, before studying at the AA.   It was in London that she first became interested in popular culture:  ‘As a continuing industrial romantic – one now nostalgic and, after Vietnam, sadder and wiser about technology – I continued to photograph pylons, bridges, pumps, freeways, and juxtapositions of these.  But by the 1950s I was surveying, as well, the shocking things of popular culture, advertising and communication’.   So, Learning from Las Vegas owes its origins to the proto-pop culture of the mid-1950s and This is Tomorrow.

Fournier Street from the church steps:-

The Wilkes Street façade of Anna Maria Garthwaite’s house:-

4, Princelet Street, next door to Anna Maria Garthwaite:-

Further down Princelet Street:-

The street sign for Sclater Street, off Brick Lane:-

And what’s left of the railway track:-

It’s so rare that Christ Church, Spitalfields is open when I’m in the neighbourhood that I braved their five o’clock service to remind myself of its interior, till recently a noble ruin, now a touch over-restored and with purple fluorescent lighting.   But I had forgotten that it contains – very appropriately – a monument to Jim Stirling (designed by Celia Scott):-

One of the pleasures of walking down Heneage Street off Brick Lane is seeing the graffiti painted by a Sheffield-based artist called Phlegm, higher quality and more inventive than much of the East London graffiti:-

There is a further public consultation on the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry today.   It was another opportunity to see the plans which have been drawn up by Raycliff for its development into a heritage centre-cum-café in the historic part of the building, with a hotel foyer in the space occupied by the building which was added at the back by James Strike between 1979 and 1981, and a large hotel on the site next door.   It may be a last chance to see the building before it is demolished:-

I read about the Neuron Pod on the Survey of London’s excellent blog about the work they are doing on Whitechapel.   It’s a symbolic construction sandwiched between the two halves of Will Alsop’s Blizard Building.   Since I was passing, I thought I would look.   It’s designed by aLL Design, an odd, but fascinating beast to have arrived in Whitechapel:-

I missed the discussion at the recent event on the character of Richard MacCormac’s architecture (or that of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard and Wright) and the extent to which it could be described as postmodern.   But this morning, I had a look at the book he produced on Jocasta Innes’s house in Spitalfields and his own next door, Two Houses in Spitalfields, just before his death.   It describes how they met after he had been told that ‘there was a woman in Heneage Street, dressed in a catsuit, swinging from a ladder and brandishing a blowtorch’;  how ‘although educated at Cambridge in the ethos of modernism, I had never been pressed into the reductive white architecture of the European modern movement’;  and how she opened up for him ‘a colour world’ – ‘illusion, allusion, surprise, humour and, of course, colour’.   These may not be pure postmodern characteristics, but they sound very like it.

I am attaching a photograph of the Brewer’s House in Heneage Street, which Jocasta Innes bought from the Spitalfields Trust in 1979, in front of the brewery which Richard MacCormac had bought not long before and next to The Pride of Spitalfields, where they first discussed whether or not life is better without architects. The house which Richard bought is next door:-

I read the article below on Twitter.   I found it a fascinating and, in multiple ways, troubling (for men) account of the problems a female partner in an architectural firm encounters, when she is also the spouse:  partly because I am very aware of the fact that the Sainsbury Wing is frequently attributed to Bob Venturi on his own and Denise Scott Brown must have suffered all the multiple forms of anger, irritation and humiliation she describes many times over during its design and subsequently – I have probably been guilty of it myself;  and partly in the light of the recent death of M.J. Long, who was never given the same level of credit as her husband, Colin St. John Wilson.   Have things changed ?  I doubt it, which is why the article deserves wide circulation.   It’s good that she is being awarded the Soane Medal on her own.
https://www.readingdesign.org/room-at-the-top

The shop windows of Fortnum & Mason are not necessarily the best place to see major works of art, nor the staircase an obvious place for a retrospective, but it is possible to see the full span of John Vertue’s career in both places, from the early tight graphic work in black ink, pencil and charcoal through to the more recent seascapes, painted in north Norfolk:-