I was pleased to see the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo as a model of an artist-run organisation – the Bildende Kunstneres Styre, now the Norwegian Visual Artists Association.  They acquired a site north of the Royal Palace in 1927 and the competition for a new building was won in 1928 by Gudolf Blackstad and Herman Munthe-Kaas for a building which is essentially modernist, but with classical elements, and two beautiful top-lit galleries on either side of a central staircase.

Picasso’s Guernica was shown there in early 1938 as part of an exhibition of contemporary French painting, MATISSE PICASSO BRAQUE LAURENS and the current exhibition by Dag Erik Elgin is a homage to it.

By chance, I was back in Oxford again today, so took the opportunity of going to see David Kohn’s Gradel Quadrangle on Mansfield Road, a fascinating experiment in mannerism.  You enter (but, of course, I wasn’t allowed to enter) by an exaggeratedly curved pink sandstone porter’s lodge and just beyond the lodge, there is a mystery tower (what does it contain ?), and, beyond the tower, similarly curvaceous, but more restrained Cotswold stone student accommodation with pink edging. 

What to make of it ? 

Well, it maybe suffers from looking a bit too startlingly new, as if it had just popped out of the dressing up box, but it should age well and it lends a lot of character to an otherwise dull bit of Oxford – Mansfield College plus chemistry labs. 

David Kohn is an interesting architect who has worked in Barcelona.  He was one of the candidates to re-do the Sainsbury Wing.  I wonder what people would have thought if he had won.  It’s not exactly Venturi Scott Brown, more Gaudi meets arts-and-crafts.  No more shocking than Keble:-

We loved Conclave which we saw at the Genesis last night: a brilliantly acted film of a papal election whose drama is presumably partly owing to the nature of a conclave and to the use of extraordinarily convincing sets to reconstruct the claustrophobia of the Vatican, but greatly helped by the amazing performances, particularly by Ralph Fiennes.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/01/conclave-review-ralph-fiennes-is-almighty-in-thrilling-papal-tussle-edward-berger-robert-harris-isabella-rossellini-5-stars

I accidentally took a wrong turn from Oxford station and found myself in Bulwarks Lane, a surprisingly old alleyway which apparently used to be called Bullocks Lane after someone in the sixteenth century called Bullock who dumped his rubbish there.  It gives an unexpectedly good view of Austen Harrison’s Nuffield College, which we slightly sneered at when I was a child, but looks pretty good for the 1950s:-

The Queen’s College must be one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere on the bend of Oxford’s High Street, serenely classical.

But the process of its design is curiously opaque.  Hawksmoor made lots of drawings for it while he was working on Blenheim, but they were too ambitious.  Construction of the front quadrangle was done by William Townesend, the head of a family of masons responsible for many of the buildings in Oxford at the time, but it is assumed that his work was either overseen or the original plans were drawn up by George Clarke, a ubiquitous and knowledgeable (and very worldly) Oxford don, who gave his collection of architectural drawings to Worcester:-

Reading Eleanora Pistis’s excellent new book, Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford, has made me look at early eighteenth-century Oxford with new interest.  One of the things that would never have crossed my mind is that the second quadrangle at University College was built from 1716-1719 out of a legacy from John Radcliffe who must be one of Oxford’s greatest benefactors – the Radcliffe Camera, the Radcliffe Observatory, the Radcliffe Infirmary – and this, which he insisted should be ‘answerable to the front already built’.

Here it is:-

Here he is, as sculpted by Francis Bird in 1719:-

https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9781905375974-1

The news that the market traders in Smithfield have finally been successfully bought off opens up the question:- What happens now to the historic market building ? What will the city do in the area ?  Does its concept of Culture Mile remain in any way valid or has it been diverted to the redevelopment of the Barbican ?

As appears to be usual with planning in the city, the process is somewhat opaque, but some time ago Studio Egret West won a competition (see below) to come up with proposals, following an earlier scheme by Terry Farrell.

This is a reminder to the city authorities that the RIBA Drawings Collection is looking for a home.  Could it be incorporated into future plans for the building ?

This is a great opportunity, as well as a historic loss.

https://wholesalemarkets.co.uk/studio-egret-west/

For those of you who are having difficulty accessing my photographs, I have been tipped off that this may be a result of what has been described – graphically if inelegantly – as ‘enshittification’, a process whereby websites start out all nice and simple, but are gradually corroded for commercial purposes, or at any rate become more difficult to use: a process which is a metaphor for life itself where we thought that the web would be our servant, but has now become our master:-

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/26/enshittification-macquarie-dictionary-word-of-the-year-explained

Now that I’m back from Ireland, I have been watching a film which Joseph Walsh commissioned about Stone Vessel, which tells one a huge amount about the craft of making – church bells as well as building:-

The Glucksman was closed in between exhibitions, but I was still able to appreciate the beauty of its building, isolated in the parkland of University College, Cork, as if lost in the trees: the grandest form of tree house:-