One of the books that I have read over Christmas has been the new biography of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser (You Say to Brick), which dishes the dirt on his multiple affairs with young architects in his office.   But much more interesting than the affairs – to me at least – was the fact that from the age of eleven he was able to take drawing classes at the Public Industrial Art School in Philadelphia, where he was taught by a man named J. Liberty Tadd, who had been a pupil of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.   Tadd had developed what he called a system of ‘natural education’ which developed skills of visualisation through the process of drawing and, also, making, skills which Kahn evidently retained not just in his ablity to draw and sketch buildings when he was travelling round Italy, but also in his ability to imagine and conceptualise buildings in three dimensions.   He was a Beaux Arts architect as well as a modernist.

Nico Macdonald has asked in the Comments section why it is that no-one normally knows about Finsbury.   I asked the same question myself as I walked through it during the week.   It’s presumably partly historical, that it is no longer a constituency (originally established as part of the Great Reform Bill), nor a metropolitan borough after being abolished in 1965;  partly topographical in that it is uneasily sandwiched between Islington which has, since the early 1970s, been much more fashionable, and Clerkenwell, which has become fahionable more recently, so that Finsbury only has its history of big estates and social improvement to recommend it, including Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre, the centrepiece of the so-called Finsbury Plan, and the fact that the borough council erected a statue to Lenin in 1942.   The Survey of London describes the area as Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, paying attention to the parish, rather than the borough.

We spent New Year’s Day happily in Tate Britain:  not too many people;  an opportunity to see the Rachel Whiteread exhibition again, including the installation of Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) in the central Duveen galleries:-

To admire the detailing of the Duveen galleries, which were designed, as I understand it, by John Russell Pope, the neo-classical architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (but in conjunction with Romaine-Walker & Jenkins):-

And we were pleased to see what seems to be a later cast of Old Flo (or is it the original ?  there is no label), on loan from a private collection, together with a maquette:-

Happy New Year !

From Bunhill Fields, I walked past St. Luke, Old Street, one of the Fifty New Churches, with a nave thought to be by John James, but with an obelisk and west tower by his colleague, Nicholas Hawksmoor:-

A block of flats protesting in Norman Street:-

I admired the Greek Revival detailing on St. Clement’s, King Square by Philip Hardwick (1822):-

Beyond on Garnault Place is the southern extension of Finsbury Town Hall with its baroque detailing by Charles Evans-Vaughan:-

So, into Amwell Street:-

I ended up in Lloyd Square with its fine houses of the early 1830s, designed by W.J. Booth for the Lloyd Baker Estate:-

Since it was clear and sunny, I set out in a slightly aimless way having long intended to see Bunhill Fields.   I walked past Brady Street cemetery, no easier to photograph with a Leica than a mobile phone:-

Across Allen Gardens:-

Through Arnold Circus:-

I stopped for a poached egg at Ozone, a giant coffee shop which has come from New Zealand to Shoreditch:-

To Bunhill Fields, the nonconformist burial ground where one can find (but I didn’t) the tombs of Bunyan, Defoe, Isaac Watts and William Blake:-

We had lunch in Bedfordshire.   After lunch, I slipped out into the garden to admire the lawns lightly covered in snow:-

I went for a short walk to blow off the cobwebs of Christmas, reduce the fat of the Christmas pudding, and exercise the Leica.   Up the canal, as usual:-

Through Meath Gardens, which has an unexpected, pyramidal, brick gate pier:-

Past the railway bridge:-

Past the curious cemetery in Globe Road:-

And back past the flats:-

I have been forbidden from posting a picture of our Christmas tree, but have been allowed to post a photograph of the Christmas decorations on the staircase, a minor work of art, which I do with best Christmas wishes to all my readers, wherever you are, a highly select group, together with a picture of the curious creature on the top of the tree:-

It was as if a bomb had dropped on East London this morning, as if everyone was sleeping off a gigantic hangover which, of course, is always possible or has gone on holiday in the Azores:  nothing but the smell of wood smoke from the barges which is soon to be banned:-

I ended up in the Ceramics Galleries:-

I admired the small statuette of a Mourning Woman by Henry Cheere, done as a preparatory model for the tomb of Thomas Archer:-

And a bust of Napoleon done in 1805:-