So, the day began with Goretti Sanmartin, the Mayor of Compostela, encouraging us to get lost.  I thought: has she been reading my blog ?  It was precisely the sensation I had enjoyed of being able to explore the city without a map or any plan of what to see because it is so well preserved as a totality, an urban environment which the city cares about not building by building, but as a whole. 

And she described the purpose of the day’s conference so precisely: to think about provenance; the ways in which an understanding of a city’s history, the trajectory of urban change, can benefit its culture.  It’s hard to imagine the Mayor of London saying anything comparable.  But, then, our Mayor was not trained as a philologist:-

I walked round the old town of Compostela, mostly in the lightest drizzle, to get a feel of its historic environment – the still medieval streets with their arcades, the seminaries, the absence of traffic, the sense of it being a place of pilgrimage round its great cathedral:-

Then I found a map and lost the magic of exploration.

In looking at the future development of Smithfield Market, I have been pointed in the direction of a report Terry Farrell did a while back which retains its validity now that the Market traders may move out: that it should retain its identity as a mixed use, cultural project, part of a Culture Mile, rather than be treated as a site for large-scale commercial development.

It’s into this context that the RIBA Drawings Collection might fit, alongside the new London Museum.

https://farrells.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Smithfield-Market_Understanding-the-Site.pdf

Over the last year, architectural historians have been exercised about the future display and availability of the RIBA drawings collection.  In my article in the current issue of The Critic, I have tried to explain the background to this concern.

The RIBA is now trying to figure out where and how its drawings collection should be stored.  I feel that one obvious possibility could be as part of the Barbican’s plans for its future development or in Smithfield Market when the traders move out.  Or Bastion House.

Helsinki has just launched a competition for an Architecture Museum.  Other cities have one.  Why not London ?  It should not have to be the responsibility of the RIBA on its own.

https://thecritic.co.uk/whither-the-ribas-drawings/

A very beautiful collection of objects on display in the gallery at the back of Hauser & Wirth in Savile Row if you happen to be passing:-

https://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/kunstsilo-art-gallery-norway

I spent the day enjoying, examining and thinking about the Kunstsilo – a new cultural project on the dockside in Kristiansand created out of a converted 1935 modernist grain silo, which has been cut in half to create a cultural atrium and then has had wings attached containing galleries. 

This is the building from the harbour:-

The inside is a magnificent raw industrial space:-

I particularly admired the invention of the staircases:-

I have just been sent Ptolemy Dean’s excellent and admirably clear account (see below) of the renovation of Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s which is itself now an integral part of the history of the station, done with sensitivity following the battle to save the station in the 1970s.

It seems so strange that this battle should have to be fought all over again, as if nothing has been learned.  And that Network Rail is so impoverished that they cannot afford to put in proper disabled access without selling off the air space over the station.  And that Herzog & de Meuron should lend their international architectural authority to such a horrible scheme.

My introduction to Kristiansand was dinner locally in Boen Gård, an early nineteenth-century house, now a hotel.  These are the outbuildings:-

The meal was sensational, each course introduced and described in loving detail – a performance.  Highly recommended if you happen to find yourself in southern Norway.