This is a gentle reminder for those who have not booked for my book launch at the Wigmore Hall next Thursday that tickets are still available.
I am pleased that so many of you have and look forward to waving from the stage.
It’s being live streamed as well for those in Tasmania.
I sadly wasn’t able to attend this year’s prize-giving for the Berger Prize, a prize given annually for a work of art history, and so have only just heard that it was won by Eleanora Pistis for her brilliant, scholarly investigation of all aspects of early eighteenth-century Oxford – Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford.
It’s a book that I greatly admired for its uncovering of the huge range of proposals for the development of Oxford beyond those that were actually built, including the Clarendon Building, All Souls and the Radcliffe Camera, and for its understanding of the complexities of architectural culture, as much about the dons who commissioned the buildings as the architects who designed them.
A good win !
I have been reading Holly Smith’s Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain with the utmost pleasure.
It conveys the ambiguity of the early history of tower blocks. It turns out that Osbert Sitwell was an early, and most unlikely, enthusiast for high rises from San Gimignano to Manhattan and was quoted in support by Dame Evelyn Sharp, the formidable Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government; and the book which promoted the benefits of new housing developments in Sheffield, including Park Hill, was illustrated with a drawing by John Piper, the editor of the Shell Guides.
I have always viewed the failure of Ronan Point as an emblem of the failure of modernism, equivalent to the blowing up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis which Charles Jencks used as marking ‘the death of modern architecture’. But here it appears as the failure of local government and the pressures on the construction industry to deliver new housing at speed. I like the comment by Sam Webb that ‘blaming Le Corbusier for this is like blaming Mozart for Muzak’.
If this early history of high rise housing is to some extent familiar from histories of the period, the later account of community action in London and Liverpool is not. It demonstrates that while families generally disliked being in high rise, there were plenty of people who were perfectly happy, providing the buildings were well maintained.
Unfortunately, what comes out most forcibly, not least from the concluding analysis of what led to the Grenfell Tower disaster, is that councils, and not just Tory ones, are often cavalier about maintenance and ignore the warnings of potential fire and its consequences.
In an admirable way, it complicates the narrative of high rise, by historically informed analysis.
I stopped off in Thaxted to see its wonderful, empty, light church where Conrad Noel was the Red Vicar, flying the red flag alongside the flag of St. George.
There is an exceptionally fine bust of him by Gertrude Hermes, dated 1938:-
I read about Charles Moore Place on the Modern House website and thought it looked interesting: not that I want to buy a new house, but that it is possible to design so called ‘executive homes’ with thought and care. As it happens, it is surrounded by multiple new build estates, which are much more standardised and just as expensive.
So, I can only applaud the developer-cum-contractor, Rooff, and the architects, Sergisson Bates for taking so much trouble in the design of a building type which, certainly architecturally, benefits from good quality construction, scrupulous design and fresh thinking:-
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I sadly missed the launch of the book Provenance in Architecture: A Dictionary at the Warburg Institute last Friday, but have been dipping into my copy whenever possible over the weekend (I contributed the entry on Craft).
It is essentially the handbook to an approach to architecture which focuses not on authorship or style, the traditional concerns of architectural history, but the trajectory of buildings through their history, not just through an examination of the complexity of their origins, but their subsequent life through changing ownership, use, adaptation and, sometimes, destruction. It is an intellectual history as much as an architectural one: very Warburgian in ethos.
Each of the entries is not really an examination of a linguistic term, but a mini-architectural or thematic case study, so it is much more readable than the average dictionary.
Uwe Fleckner, the Director of the Warburg Haus in Hamburg (and much else) and Mari Lending of the Oslo School of Architecture have done an astonishing job in commissioning, editing and overseeing the book, which has been handsomely produced by Hatje Cantz.
One of the pleasures of seeing several properties in Spitalfields in quick succession was the opportunity to compare different approaches to conservation.
19, Princelet Street has a philosophy of minimal intervention: stabilising the fabric just enough to ensure that it is safe to visit, but otherwise to do as little as possible to retain the atmosphere of past time and create a space for historical contemplation.
The House of Annetta presents a somewhat different set of opportunities and challenges because its previous owner, Annetta Pedretti, had herself deconstructed so much of the fabric of the building down to its material bones. Here the philosophy is to reinvest the building with social life through engagement with, and the involvement of, the local community, so that the built fabric becomes merely the backdrop to multifarious social activity.
Then, Dennis Severs’s house where each room is treated, as Severs described it, as ‘a still life drama’, part of a theatrical experience in which authenticity is less important than evocation.
Each different in purpose and effect.
A lesson in the politics and practice of conservation.
I have been to the synagogue in Princelet Street a couple of times before; but was again impressed by the sense of walking into a time capsule, so little has changed since it was deconsecrated in 1980 and acquired by the Spitalfields Trust.
Everything rattles and shakes, but that is part of the atmosphere:-
On the top floor is David Rodinsky’s room:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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