We had the inaugural Architecture Lecture in the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, delivered, very appropriately, by Professor Sir David Chipperfield RA.

He concentrated on three issues.

The first was the creation of an appropriate amount of public space in any building project, beginning with the terrace and colonnade outside the otherwise very internalised Museum of Literature in Marbach.   The second was the creation of space for playing ping pong alongside his Jumex Museum in Mexico City, which reminded me of the public space underneath the podium of Lino Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum of Art.   The third was the amount of public circulation above ground in the neoclassical colonnade of the James Simon Building in Berlin, soon to open.

The second issue was, and is, his reference to history.   We were reminded of how the majority of German’s wanted a precise reconstruction of August Stüler’s monumental staircase in the Neues Museum, not a faint echo of it.   But how Berliners queued round the block to see the newly reconstructed Neues Museum, once it was completed.

The third issue was the way architects have to attend to the detail of projects, including the different types of window frame in Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin.   Should the original be maintained, in spite of the fact that it had, and would, leak ?  Or should there be a modern equivalent ?  Or an adaptation of the original ?

Chipperfield argued for an adaptation of the original on this and other occasions.   A sensitivity for history and its legacy, but a freedom to adapt and re-invent it, when necessary.   The spirit of Ruskin and the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, which he brought so effectively to his work in Berlin, and now, more recently, to the renovation of Burlington Gardens.

The unlikely star of the new Collections Gallery at the RA is Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Satan Summoning His Legions, partly because scarcely anybody has seen it before, partly because it’s so unlike anything one expects of Thomas Lawrence, the fashionable portraitist, and partly because his wispy crotch confronts the viewer with what is so obviously missing. It was painted in 1796 for the 1797 Summer Exhibition, where it was shown under the title of ‘Satan calling his Legions. First Book of Milton’. Lawrence was 28. He had been recognised as a prodigy as a child, drawing pencil portraits for customers at the Black Bear Inn in Devizes and later pastels in Bath, before moving to London with his parents in 1787 to study at the Royal Academy Schools. But already as a teenager, he had a darker side to his personality, telling Charles Eastlake in 1822 how he used to spend his nights as a teenager copying the prophets and sibyls from prints of the Sistine Ceiling. George III encouraged the Royal Academy to elect him as an Academician in 1790 when he was still under age (you had to be twenty five). He was elected in 1794, aged twenty five. Satan Summoning His Legions was presumably his bid to be taken seriously as a history painter. If so, it was extremely unsuccessful. Richard Westall thought Lawrence unqualified ‘to paint historical subjects. He has little of the creative power’ and Hoppner said that he would ‘Give £100 to have Lawrences Satan out of room, as it takes effect from his pictures’. It was his last such attempt.

I was asked to give a talk tonight to the Limehouse Community Forum in the church of St. Anne’s:  a great pleasure, for me at least, to be inside its barn-like interior, trying to imagine what it was like for an early eighteenth-century congregation when Limehouse was no more than a small riverside community clustered round the boatyards.

It’s not often that I see the church in the evening:-

St. Anne’s passage which always sounds rather rude:-

And as I left, the churchyard had a ghostly light:-

Over the years, I have had my fair share of run-ins with Waldemar Januszczak, as he is the first to acknowledge; but he has done the building project proud in today’s Culture Section of the Sunday Times, seeing and understanding exactly its symbolic value in opening up the art school and creating ‘a moon-shaped auditorium in the Greek fashion, with an exciting Enlightenment mood…If ever a space demanded to be used for the exploration of new ideas, this is it’. He couldn’t have written better about it.

In the literature of Postmodernism, I would have liked there to be space to mention Rick Mather’s internal renovation of the Architectural Association, including its upstairs bar and downstairs basement restaurant, none of which now survives. Of course, Rick Mather is probably not properly regarded as post-modern, but I remember feeling that his work at the Arhitectural Association introduced a new vocabulary of design in the late 1970s – smarter, sleeker, more sophisticated and more American (he was himself American) – which, given its location in the heartland of London architectural teaching, made it feel programmatic. Maybe it was more post-minimal than post-modern, but he was included alongside Chipperfield, Eric Parry and Stanton Williams in an exhibition at the 9H Gallery in which his Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia is an obvious and wilful contrast to the work of Denys Lasdun, interested in surface, detail and finish in a way that Lasdun was not and which is one of the beneficial characteristics of the postmodern.

One of the obvious things in reading about the history of Postmodernism in London is the extent to which, as with so many stylistic movements, it revolved round a relatively small group of people.   A key influence was Léon Krier, who came to London from Stuttgart in 1968, worked in James Stirling’s office for a year, lived in Belsize Park near Stirling and Ed Jones, and had a much more European view of urbanism and its history than most modernists at the time. Another was Charles Jencks, who studied under Reyner Banham and published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in 1977. There’s a picture of this group by Carl Laubin all standing on the balcony of the Royal Opera House, Papadakis holding a banner for Post-Modernism: Andreas Papadakis, James Stirling, James Gowan, Léon Krier, Charles Jencks (it looks to me more like Ed Jones), Terry Farrell and Fenella Dixon (out of shot):-

Although I was still feeling rather groggy with a summer cold, I hauled myself out of bed to witness the first visitors arrive in Burlington Gardens.   I wanted to see and experience what it felt like to ordinary visitors, not just our Friends who have been exploring it gingerly over the last few days.

I discovered our Head of Collections dusting down the skeletons:-

And was able to photograph him with the first real visitors:-

The courtyard looks festive in the morning sun:-

And I had a cappuccino in the Poster Bar:-

It’s a day of celebration.

In the interests of the historical record, I am posting a piece I wrote for the RA’s in-house magazine about the experience of watching visitors enjoy the new building in the first few days:-

I’ve been asked to record my reactions to the new building.  It happens that the request has arrived just as I have sat down to a cappucino in the Casson Room (buns are either off the menu or have all been eaten) after walking round to get a feel for our visitors’ response.

​I enjoyed going round, not least because appearing on ‘The Private Life of the Royal Academy’ means that many more Friends recognise me and come up​ and chat, including Sandy Wilson’s first wife.  I see them doing a double take and then ask a question to check that I’m real.

I was particularly pleased to see that the Dorfman Senate Room was packed in the middle of the afternoon even though you can only get beer, not tea.  The space is humanised, literally as well as metaphorically, by being used.

I’m delighted by the trio of commercial spaces on the ground floor, which strike just the right balance between being clearly commercial, but also appropriate to the atmosphere of the building – the Poster Bar which has been designed to be like the bar of an Eastern European railway station, the Personal Shopping space with its plan chest, and the Newsstand with the latest art magazines (and, by the way, buy a card, write it, and have it posted for you – a lovely idea):-

One of the things that many people have remarked on is the centrality of the Schools and the way that this changes people’s attitude to the Academy.  Of course, as the President says, this was the whole point of the scheme.  But the theory can be different to the practice.  I had not anticipated how key it is to the experience, mixing new art with old, the anarchic with the respectable, giving a frisson as one travels through the vaults into the Weston studio.  It puts practice at the heart of the Academy in a wonderful way.

Another thing that has given me incredible pleasure is seeing staff sitting out in the sun eating sandwiches under the pleached trees of the Lovelace Courtyard.

After many years of staring at ground plans and CGIs, the experience is suddenly real, like a cartoon which has sprung into life.

But the real test will be 10 o’clock on Saturday when the first visitors walk in.

I have been reading the booklet, the return of the past: Conversations on Postmodernism, which the Soane Museum has produced to accompany its exhibition.   It consists of interviews with the key protagonists and makes clear that while we tend now to think of it as merely a colourful style of historical pastiche, it had its origins in a widespread disillusionment in the early 1970s with the whole apparatus of the welfare state, local authority control of housing, statism and the standardisation which was a characteristic of modernism.   Piers Gough saw himself as a pop architect wanting people to like and enjoy what he produced, including the taxi drivers who bought flats in Cascades.   Jeremy Dixon toured the country talking to branches of the RIBA and was embarrassed by what his profession had inflicted on British cities.   I had a flashback to what it was actually like in 1974 with hyperinflation, the beginnings of IRA bombings, two general elections, and the three-day week.   It is hardly surprising that architects looked for new solutions to reconnect architecture to its public.

It’s time now to catch up on all the things I didn’t have time to do in the week.   One of them is to identify the sitters in Henry Singleton’s big painting of The Royal Academicians in General Assemby which now has pride of place in our new Collections Gallery.   So far as I can find, this can only be done by reference to a published Key to the Royal Academicians, which was produced by Charles Bestland to accompany the original engraving (there is no key provided in the Gallery, nor in the recently published book about our History and Collections).

Benjamin West is easy, sitting in pride of place on the President’s Chair in a cocked hat, painted in 1795 three years after he had become President and after turning down a knighthood in the expectation that he would be made a life peer.   The figure immediately to his right is Sir Francis Bourgeois, described in the key as ‘Painter to His Majesty and to the Kg of Poland’:-

On the left are three figures (6,8 and 10 in the key) – Sir William Beechey, Portrait Painter to His Majesty;  Francis Wheatley;  and Joseph Wilton, now aged 73 and Keeper of the Schools, wearing spectacles:-

Standing proudly underneath Laocoön is Benjamin West’s fellow countryman, John Singleton Copley

And next door to Copley, Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, and John Opie, the Cornish painter:-