Yesterday was a very full-on day with Romilly getting her OBE from the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace.

Here she is with Aneta in the courtyard afterwards:-

Then lunch at the Arlington and the Queen of Spades at Garsington.

It was a big day !

Last night was an event to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of the Royal Drawing School.  25 artists had been asked to contribute work, including the King and Rufus Wainwright who performed Hallelujah on the piano.  It was hard to get a chance to see the work, but it will be shown at the Royal Drawing School in Charlotte Road from next Tuesday and is commemorated in a beautifully produced large book, designed by Pentagram.  It shows the work, together with quotations about the importance of drawing.

I particularly like the comment by Tim Burton:-

Drawings are like an abstract diary for me…a time, a place, a feeling.  Nothing literal, but a memory.

https://royaldrawingschool.org/events/25

I always love visiting Boughton – the sense of a French château lost in the Northamptonshire countryside; but I have never previously had the Duke’s tour which made sense of the complex history of the Montagus.

Sir Edward Montagu acquired the estate in 1528.

The 3rd. Sir Edward Montagu was made a peer in 1528.

After the Restoration, Ralph Montagu becomes Ambassador in Paris, develops Francophile tastes and builds Boughton – architect unknown – in the 1680s.  He became a Duke in 1705:-

John Montagu, the second Duke, was more of an aesthete, ‘a most amiable man’ according to Horace Walpole.

This is the north front attached to and wrapped around the Tudor hall:-

The inside full of wonderful things:-

And then we had a brisk walk round the gardens:-

Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Minor played fortissimo by Elisabeth Leonskaja on the top floor of the Ragged School Museum last night must rank as one of the more memorable musical experiences. She is nearly 80, trained in Russia, plays Schubert in a way that does not feel Schubertian, but with such power and intensity of feeling. It didn’t seem to matter at all that there was another concert going on in the park next door because everyone was rapt. Not to mention Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy playing together and a performance of the Piano Trio in B flat major with Elisabeth Leonskaja on the piano. Quite an evening.

We went to an astonishing concert on the top floor of the Ragged School Museum: boiling hot, windows open, the sound of motorbikes and seagulls competing with the most sublime performances of Schubert’s piano music – Four Impromptus played by Samson Troy, Six Moments Musicaux by Pavel Kolesnikov and, most memorable of all, Three Klavierstücke played by Elisabeth Leonskaja, a fellow Russian, born in Tbilisi in 1945, left Russia for Vienna in 1978.  It was incredibly intense.

I have been sent a very careful, thoughtful and well-informed description/discussion of Peter Zumthor’s new building for LACMA which is nearing completion after a mere 25 years of planning, conception, fund-raising and frequent controversy:-

https://www.punchlistmag.com/p/review-peter-zumthor-s-controversial-lacma-wing-is-flawed-and-thrilling

I have taken a close personal interest in the development of the Sainsbury Wing, not least because I have long been an admirer of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown which has made it a highly contentious project from the moment that changes were first proposed.

Here is my verdict:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/a-respectful-renovation/

I was invited to a screening of a film, Temptation of Influence, by an architect/filmmaker, Marko Milovanovic, about the ways in which influences in architecture are received/transmitted across generations.

From Louis Kahn to Shane de Blacam, who worked on the completion of the Yale Center for British Art after Kahn’s death in Penn Station on 17 March 1974; from de Blacam to Sheila O’Donnell, who was one of his first year students in his first year of teaching at University College, Dublin in 1976; from Palladio to de Blacam, who stayed in a monastery in Padua to visit all the works of Palladio by bicycle and train; from Kahn and de Blacam to Niall McLaughlin who was required as his first project aged 17 to construct a model of a saltbox house

The way architects look at and remember details of construction and adapt them or reject them through history, learning across time.

Very well worth seeing, but probably only available online, if that.

Spitalfields celebrated its 300th. birthday yesterday with a very jolly street party:-

I have been alerted to the increasingly bizarre situation surrounding the potential modernisation of Liverpool Street Station (see below).  As posters on Instagram suggest, it could benefit from new loos and better disabled access.  But does this really require building tower blocks on top of the station or the adjacent hotel, completely out of scale with the station itself ?

Liverpool Street Station was preserved as the result of one of the epic conservation battles of the 1970s.  The adjacent land was developed as Broadgate, which is already in the process of being demolished. 

Why can’t we just leave the Victorian train sheds alone, preserve them and protect them, with their lovely Victorian roofs and ironwork detailing ?  And put in some new lifts and escalators and maybe renovate the hotel.

It requires a firm of good conservation architects, not a lot of aggressively posturing new build, creating new offices which may not be required.

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/exclusive-herzog-and-de-meuron-working-on-all-new-rival-liverpool-street-plans?utm_id=7378&delivery_name=8105&utm_campaign=FABS_AJ_EDITORIAL_DAILY_NEWS_REG&utm_content=&utm_term=Exclusive%3A%20Herzog%20and%20de%20Meuron%20working%20on%20all-new%20rival%20Liverpool%20Street%20plans&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Adestra&eea=RzlOQXJYamhWYUp1UmRDTm83ZlE5QT09