We had lunch in Loughton. In the front yard was what looked like a brand new Morris 1300. I found it much more deeply nostalgic than the average vintage car, maybe because my mother had a Morris 1100, I think grey rather than biscuit, parked outside at home. It looked so small, although I was assured it’s not, like a model car:-

I haven’t previously registered the Architecture Today awards, probably because instead of celebrating novelty, they focus on use and how buildings have weathered the test of time: so, less heroic and less obviously noticeable than the buildings which win the Stirling Prize. Some are recent eg Wright and Wright’s work for St. John’s College, Oxford, solid and serious in a context where longevity is essential. Penoyre & Prasad’s Rushton Street Surgery is shown in a photograph taken by Sunand Prasad, where the building is less visible than the way it has been absorbed into its surroundings. Several are renovation projects eg the Barbican. It makes one think about the nature of quality in architecture with a focus on architectural sensitivity, not novelty: a good shift in direction.

https://architecturetoday.co.uk/finalists-unveiled-for-architecture-today-awards-2023/

Am sad to read of the death of Michael Kaufmann, who was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the V&A when I arrived in 1982: an unfailingly helpful, genial and occasionally sardonic figure who I associate more with the Warburg where he had been a student in the 1950s when it was still in South Kensington than with the Courtauld where he moved as its Director in 1985.

He was presumably a student of Hugo Buchtal and worked in the Warburg’s Photographic Collection before moving to Manchester City Art Gallery as an Assistant Keeper in 1960. At the V&A, he was Assistant to the Director in the early 1960s – it must have been to Trenchard Cox, before John Pope-Hennessy took over. It was always said that Michael had been instrumental in establishing the V&A’s Education Department which is extremely likely as he had an active commitment to the educational aspects of the museum, which is no doubt partly why he moved in the 1980s to the Courtauld.

https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/professor-michael-kaufmann-fba-1931-2023/

On my early back to the airport from Istanbul Modern, I stopped very briefly at Arter, a building by Grimshaw which opened in September 2019. It was a project which I would have liked to include in The Art Museum in Modern Times. Maybe one day there will be a new edition.

Not great photographs, I’m afraid:-

Am.in Istanbul to review it’s new contemporary art museum for the Burlington Magazine. You will have to wait for my considered verdict, but it certainly has an amazing location:-

We went to a memorable memorial event for Michael Hopkins in his house in Suffolk in which I inevitably learned more about his architectural practice.

I half knew, but only half, that he had bought a timber frame house by the church in Cratfield, Suffolk, whilst still a student at the AA, so whilst he was building the purest glass house modernism in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, he was simultaneously fiddling round with medieval forms of construction at weekends, an ambiguity which seems essential to understanding his architectural practice.

The other thing which sticks in my mind is that he taught at Yale, but the students undertook a project based in Aldeburgh, which required them to undertake a deep examination of a historic building and everything about its context and construction, which felt as close as one would get to his approach to architecture.

The third thing worth recording, which I did not know, is that he would retreat to a room next door to where we would eat – it was, in a way, his office – where he would draw, but also write, surrounded by the life of the house, but very slightly separate from it. This also was an ambiguity in his temperament, both quiet, but also very present.

If you go to the preview of the Christie’s sale of Old Master paintings this week, you will find in the room on the left at the top of the stairs two display cases showing installations of the nails drawn from Old Master paintings. We went to see them yesterday afternoon:-

There is a certain amount of doom-mongering in today’s FT about Canary Wharf following the news that HSBC is relocating to the City.

Oddly, I am rather pro-Canary Wharf having watched its development from when it was just a gleam in the eye of Michael von Clemm who was looking for somewhere for the back-of-house facilities for Roux Brothers, of which he was chairman. He realised the potential of somewhere where it would be easier to build high-rise office blocks with big floor plates than in the conservative City. Of course, the City was jealous and has itself allowed a square mile of hideous new development which presumably means that it is now not so expensive to rent office space in the City.

What may have been forgotten is that George Jacobescu kept the best site by the river for a cultural institution after Margaret Thatcher had offered it to the National Portrait Gallery to relocate from central London.

After the great success of the newly refurbished NPG in central London, might it be a time to resurrect this idea – not, of course, a total move, but somewhere with more space for its twentieth-century collection and its huge and wonderful photography collection ?

It could ease what looks like being huge pressure of numbers on the beautifully restored, existing building.

HSBC departure spells doom for isolated experiment of Canary Wharf – https://on.ft.com/3NBgDzM via @FT

It was so nice to see the small retrospective of the work of Jean Cooke at the Garden Museum. She was still very much around when I first went to the RA – diminutive, but terrifically feisty, always at the heart of discussions with strongly expressed views.

Here she is in 1958:-

John Bratby from the RCA:-

Hortus Siccus (1967):-

Pansies:-

A beautiful, pioneering exhibition.