Having recently read Sylvia Brownrigg’s discovery of her family past through an envelope sent to her father by her great-grandmother, I have now read Ariane Bankes’s comparable discovery of the extraordinary lives of her mother, Celia Paget, and her mother’s twin sister, Mamaine, from a trunkful of inherited letters. 

It’s an extraordinary story.  They were obviously both spectacularly attractive and half the intellectuals of the time seem to have fallen for one or other of them – or both.  Mamaine had a long affair with Arthur Koestler which included a short time off for a passionate fling with Albert Camus.  Meanwhile, Celia was close to George Orwell and Robert Conquest and had affairs with A.J. Ayer and Jeremy Hutchinson.  Nearly all the men behaved consistently badly, most especially Arthur Koestler who is both the hero and the villain of the book.  Gosh !

I have just spotted that Oliver Wainwright’s review of the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand has now appeared online.  Having spent the last few days being pumped for my views of the building by Norwegian architects, this is a very fair summary of what was involved: the generosity of Nicolai Tangen; the elements of controversy when first proposed; the quality of the public spaces; and the ways in which it is likely to transform the economy of Kristiansand.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/may/16/kunstsilo-grain-silo-gallery-kristiansand-norway-trillion-dollar-man?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

You may have been wondering what I have been doing in Compostela for the last three days.

The answer is attending a symposium/seminar on issues of Provenance in architecture.

Provenance is much more familiar – at least to me – as a term in art history, a methodology used to track systematically changes in the ownership of paintings, a practice which has been much more significant in recent years as it has become more necessary to know the legitimacy of title to a work of art; and it has presumably been a way of understanding changes in how a painting has been valued and esteemed historically.

Its application to architecture is more recent: in fact, the seminar is pioneering, certainly promoting, a new approach to both history and contemporary architectural practice in focusing attention on the long history of the ownership of buildings: their life story; alterations, adaptations, circumstances of sale; and, in one case study, their demolition.

It’s good in that it moves attention away from architects as creators of form to their responsibility to think about how buildings are used: to plan for a long history instead of a quick sale.

There’s more to come.

At the end of the morning, we were allowed inside:-

It was a combination of grand decay and secret spaces:-

We came by bus to the estate at Lourizán, a nineteenth-century summer cottage, partly dating from 1893, but substantially renovated in Second Empire Style in 1909 by Jenaro de la Fuente Domínguez.  In 1946 it was turned into a technical school for forestry, but is now dilapidated, awaiting renovation following an architectural competition organised by the Fundación RIA:-

The gardens are magical, formally laid out, but now overgrown:-

We ended at the greenhouse:-

My last post from Compostela is of the park next door to the Galician Contemporary Art Centre which was also apparently laid out by Alvaro Siza, a beautiful hybrid between formal and informal.  I even photographed it in colour:-

I did not know and should have done that the Galician Contemporary Art Centre was designed by Alvaro Siza between 1988 when the project was first planned and 1993 when it opened.

It’s a tough building, of Galician granite, in a beautiful setting opposite the Convent of San Domingos de Bonaval, just outside the city centre:-

There is a ravishing daylit entrance, all of Galician marble:-

There is beautiful furniture designed by Siza:-

And a strange roof-top, replicating the alleyways and urban spaces in the city below:-

One of the best places in Santiago is its market, designed in 1937 by Joaquín Vaquero Palacios in a style of robust, rustic classicism, opened in 1941, much admired by Aldo Rossi when he visited Compostela for SIAC 1976:-

I took the long route to lunch calling in on the courtyards of the former Pilgrim’s Hospital, now the Parador:-

And admired the sculpture of Adam on its façade:-

The church of St. Francis looks unused:-

The church of St. Martin Pinario was also shut:-

Then I walked by back streets and alleyways to our rendezvous at Abastos 2.0 by the market place:-

We were able to walk across the roof of the Cathedral.  Quite an experience, seeing the baroque towers so close up:-

We ended up in front of the Pórtico de la Gloria, an extraordinary feat of medieval carving, so unexpectedly life-like, s much less stylised than the equivalent sculpture of south-west France to which it is compared.

No photography.

Then to the little museum.

S. Sebastián c.1450:-

And the cloister:-