It’s a long time since I’ve had an opportunity to wander through the British Galleries, the great project for the refurbishment of what had previously been the primary galleries in the south-west wing of the V&A where my office used to be long ago, still a rich and dense cultural experience of objects some of which I remember, like the Melville bed:-

And Charles II:-

Some of which I don’t, like the mourning putto:-

I had forgotten that I had taken a photograph of one of the odder aspects of John Pawson’s Life House which is a room at the end of a dark corridor where one is encouraged to lie and contemplate one’s fate, inspired by a quotation from Pascal carved into the floor: ALL MEN’S MISERIES DERIVE FROM NOT BEING ABLE TO SIT IN A QUIET ROOM ALONE.

I’m not sure that this is exactly how I would choose to spend a weekend in the countryside, immured in a windowless cell:-

In October, we stayed in John Pawson’s Life House which he designed in remotest Radnorshire for what was Alain de Botton’s project, Living Architecture (de Botton is no longer involved with it). Over the years, we have stayed in nearly all their houses: not least they are inevitably, being new, much more disabled friendly than the Landmark Trust.

I felt that not enough has been done to consider the importance of his project in terms of introducing the idea of genuinely contemporary and adventurous architecture to a sceptical British public who are mostly fed a diet of Barrett homes and prefer to escape to the past for their holiday homes. So, I have written about it in this month’s The Critic and my article has just gone online in their December/January issue.

I can now publish my not very good photographs of it. It eludes photography being almost wilfully subfusc, adopting the language of local agricultural buildings, presumably in order to get planning permission:-

Weekends à la mode | Charles Saumarez Smith | The Critic Magazine

We went to the new film about Anselm Kiefer. I did admire it: beautiful cinematography; illuminating about the circumstances of his life, particularly the influence of Joseph Beuys. Oddly, his son playing his father was almost more convincing and had more cinematic presence than Kiefer himself. The young Kiefer is Wenders’s grand nephew, also very good.

I kept on thinking about our visit to Barjac in May 2015 when we arrived at Avignon Airport and the van we had booked was not there, so we rented a lorry and the fire brigade hoisted the wheelchair on to the back.

It was the most extraordinary, intense and moving visit, which a film can only suggest and is somehow inevitably an inadequate substitute for the experience and life of the work – and seeing Barjac – itself.

I love this paean to Pevsner by its production editor which conveys so much about its oddity – the fact that an astringent and very Germanic, scholarly, but dry architectural historian, who, when he first came to England, was still enthralled by Hitler (I learned this from his Birmingham landlady, before it was more widely known), should have embedded himself so deeply in the culture of rural, British culture, everyone who wants to help to develop specialist knowledge about buildings.

The office is closing down, when I assumed it was like the Forth Bridge and, once the second edition had been finished, would start on a revised version of London, half of which has now been demolished. Shouldn’t it have a preservation order ? It’s so much a part of architectural history, culture, knowledge and appreciation.

https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2023/11/15/learning-to-love-pevsner-architectural-guides/

The Cold Press, a beautiful gallery in Holt, has moved to what was Timothy Everest’s atelier in Elder Street, but it is open only by appointment.

We visited today:-

I was walking down the embankment on the opposite side of the river to the Palace of Westminster when my eye was caught by a fine statue in a pretty run-down part of St. Thomas’s Hospital.  It turns out that it is a statue by Grinling Gibbons of Robert Clayton, the land agent, banker, MP and philanthropist who spent the latter phase of his life devoting himself to the construction of a new building for St. Thomas’s Hospital as its President.  It also turns out that it is due for removal owing to the fact that like most city people at the time, including Robert Geffrye, he invested in the Royal African Company which, under the auspices of the Duke of York, before he was King, transported slaves from Africa to America. 

The statue is Grade 1 listed:-

I don’t do as many posts about the Royal Drawing School as I maybe should, but it’s been a busy week: the private view of the Drawing Year on Tuesday and tonight an opening for their open studios which I have never previously seen.

I recommend a visit to the end-of-year show in the gallery at 19-22, Charlotte Road EC2 – richly varied work by young artists from a great range of backgrounds, not just fine art – actually, not so many from fine art – but more from philosophy, architecture, fashion and illustration, which maybe demonstrates an increasing pluralism in fine art practice. See below:-

A very interesting, thoughtful and carefully considered Linbury Lecture at the National Gallery (actually held at the Royal Academy) by Annabelle Selldorf in which she was able to expound her credo regarding museums and their display ahead of her re-working of the Sainsbury Wing due to re-open in May 2025.

I hope it will be published – it very much deserves to be – but in case it’s not, these are my cod notes on it (sorry, it’s a longer post than usual).

She expressed her views of what works best by describing museums and galleries she admires and has been influenced by:-

1. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne.

An obvious choice and a good one for someone brought up in Cologne: richly various collections displayed in interiors of post-war, social democratic austerity in a city we bombed to smithereens.

2. The Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Leo von Klenze adapted post-war by two long staircases bringing you up to the main floor (and down), not disguising the fact that it had been bombed, then renovated.

3.  The Accademia, Venice

I particularly admired her careful description of the changes made by Carlo Scarpa immediately post-war, not least in the abstract way the paintings were displayed, independent of the architecture and demonstrating the complexity of its ground plan.

4. Marfa

Donald Judd.  Industrial buildings used for the display of art.  It requires a pilgrimage to get there (she didn’t say that).

5. The Frick Collection

Another obvious choice because she is involved in both renovating and adding to it, but she demonstrated her appreciation of both the original building by Thomas Hastings (1912-1914) with its domestic interiors – no route, no labels – then John Russell Pope’s changes in the late 1930s to make it into a public gallery.  She was also responsible for the temporary display of the collection in what used to be the Whitney Museum, then briefly the Met Breuer.  Great works of art can survive and perhaps benefit from being seen in austere surroundings.  Her revised Frick, plus additions, is due to open next year.

6. The Yale University Art Gallery

Louis Kahn’s first building at Yale from 1953, of which she showed a photograph I hadn’t seen before, maybe taken when it opened.  She admires it for its ‘clarity and economy of means’ and ‘careful rendition of daylight’ (words chosen with care).

7. The National Gallery

Was the National Gallery her seventh choice ? Or have I missed one ?  She showed the planned changes to the outside first – pretty uncontroversial, cleaning up the approach and clarifying it.  Then, views of the interior and what looked like a reading area/small bookshop on what remains of the first-floor mezzanine. This part is what has been, and with some remains, contentious as an adaptation of a Grade 1 listed building. But it looks as if it is being done in such a way as to preserve the mood of the original as far as possible and sensibly dispenses with the bookshop which marred the whole spirit of the original entrance as designed by Denise Scott Brown (she wrote a brilliant, detailed description of her thinking just before it went to Westminster for approval).

It would be hard to fault the depth of Selldorf’s knowledge and deep involvement in all aspects of museum layout, museum display, and what environment works best for works of art. As she says, the changes to the Sainsbury Wing may not be so obvious after a few years and may even – a heretical thought – enhance, and surely respect, its character.

Having just seen the announcement that Lacaton & Vassal have won this year’s Soane Medal, I was pleased to read Edwin Heathcote’s thoughtful appreciation of their importance – important for doing less and being interested in existing structures and preserving where possible.

Perhaps they could be commissioned for their views about what to do about Liverpool Street Station.

https://www.untappedjournal.com/issues/issue-7/edwin-heathcote-architecture-of-doing-nothing