Today is the day when the press come to see and examine our new building.   There have already been good write-ups by Rowan Moore in yesterday’s Observer (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/13/royal-academy-london-new-extension-david-chipperfield) and this morning’s Guardian by Olly Wainwright (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/13/royal-academy-of-arts-expansion-reveals-hidden-life-art-schools).   Meanwhile, the sun is shining and there’s a huge banner in the Courtyard:-

In preparation for Tacita Dean’s exhibition which opens later this week in our new Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, I have started reading her Selected Writing which the RA has published to accompany the exhibition.   I very strongly recommend it for the poetry of its evocative descriptions, its explanation for her obsession with clouds and four-leaf clovers, her description of the formation of collections, of the Gellért Baths in Budapest and the beach at Dungeness, written in the intensely allusive, memory-laden style – idiosyncratic and observational – of W.G. Sebald, but many of the pieces published before Sebald was (she first read Rings of Saturn in Fiji in September 1999 after her style was formed).

I was talking about the pros and cons of Postmodernism this morning, prompted by Edwin Heathcote’s long article about it in this weekend’s FT, when I spotted a characteristic piece of docklands pomo, which is a bust of the engineer, John Rennie, in a prominent position on Spirit Quay, itself a monument to that era of docklands development.   It’s by a sculptor called John Ravera.   Very hard to photograph against the light:-

Since publishing my book on East London (bizarrely and belatedly reviewed in this month’s World of Interiors), I have been much less adventurous in my excursions.   But today in walking up the Regent’s Canal, I was pleased to spot on a hundred yard stretch of the Regent’s Canal a multi-coloured version of the Venus de Medici:-

A new museum which opens this afternoon, described as an ‘archive of dreams’:-

The Widgeon Theatreboat which has a jazz evening next Sunday evening:-

Not to mention the copy of the Alcibiades Dog which guards the entrance to Victoria Park presiding over an ice cream van:-

In my tentative ventures on to Twitter, I have had barely any response to any of my tweets apart for one yesterday about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.   I have known that for many years they have been candidates for the RIBA Gold Medal, because I have been asked to write in their support, but have been told (very forcefully) that there is absolutely no way that this will ever be allowed to happen.   Why the vehemence ?   I suppose it is partly that Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was one of the early death knells of doctrinaire modernism, because of its admiration for references to history and particularly mannerism (the qualities of complexity in its title).   And Learning from Las Vegas was in its own way equally, if not more significant in its timing and recognition that architecture has a semiotics.   But these ideological battles are now long ago.   Surely it is time to bury the hatchet and recognise their significance in architectural thought, independent of the politics surrounding the competition for, and design of, the Sainsbury Wing.

I have just heard on the radio the news of the death of Tessa Jowell, not especially surprising owing to her cancer, but very sad nonetheless. I don’t always admire politicians, but I did her, for a special quality of warmth, friendliness and empathy which is rare is anyone, let alone a politician.

As I set off early in the morning to be interviewed with Tacita Dean on the Today programne (went out live at 8.50 this morning), I was struck by the quality of the shadows on the wall under the shepherds’ hats from Dagestan:-

I was putting the finishing touches to an account I have written of the 1949 Summer Exhibition for the Paul Mellon Centre’s annual chronicle of the exhibition which is due to be published online later this month.   At the time that I wrote it, I did not know that John Rothenstein had reviewed the exhibition in The Tablet as Director of the Tate.   He was pretty dismissive, describing it as ‘one of the most dispiriting he remembered’, but, on the other hand, was full of admiration for the work of Winston Churchill.   His conclusion was that, ‘One thing, at least, is unambiguously apparent:  towards academic standards the selection committee show – I should rather say parade – an indifference which makes nonsense of the insistent claim of the Academy to represent “Tradition”‘.

Now that Johnnie Shand Kydd’s amazing group photograph of the majority of RAs lined up on the grand staircase of Burlington Gardens has been published by the Evening Standard, I hope it’s all right for me to document the amazing scene as they all lined up in the March cold:-

I have spent the last couple of days watching architectural photographers trying to work out how and where to photograph it in order to convey its essential characteristics and by chance this evening came across some photographs of its difficult, ornate, high Victorian, classical façade which I always think might as well be in Berlin as London:-