We’re staying in a pretty grungy area of Paris, as close as it’s possible to be to the Gare du Nord. Not many sites, only the Eglise St. Vincent-de-Paul, started by Jean-Baptiste Lepère and completed by Jacques Hittorff:-

A nice local market, the Marché St. Quentin:-

And we walked down to the Passage Brady:-

In general, Paris has kept its historic character so much better than London: less demolition, less new build, a policy of retaining smaller shops:-

We went to the opening of Hurly-Burly, the exhibition at Gagosian in Paris of the work of Phyllida Barlow, Rachel Whiteread and Alison Wilding – all of them friends of one another, working in a free and inventive way which has obvious parallels in each other’s work, but each of them with a very distinctive, competing/contrasting aesthetic.

A big work by Phyllida Barlow:-

Also, Phyllida Barlow:-

Alison Wilding’s Hocus Pocus:-

Alison Wilding’s X:-

And Rachel Whiteread in person:-

Since it has now been announced by his former colleagues at the American University of Beirut, I feel I should maybe register that my older brother, Richard, died yesterday morning after falling and hitting his head on a rock in Tyre. He was nine years older than me, had taught for many years in the Anthropology Department in AUB, and was on his way back from the gym.

Below is a picture of him in the Amazon jungle in the summer of 1965, where he made recordings of the Chocó Indians, now held by the Pitt Rivers Museum.

https://images.app.goo.gl/PPjpMKCBxmxkG39K8

A very interesting article by Edwin Heathcote on the changing culture of the office, if you have a subscription (see below).

When we were planning the offices for Burlington Gardens, we used Jeremy Myerson, the co-author of one of the books, as a consultant. The general move was away from private space towards public, communal space with places for people to meet and discuss and work together. But I am not convinced that everyone relishes being in a compulsory community which could be why people prefer being on a laptop at home, freely able to think without interruptions.

My first office was in X block next to the car park in Christ’s College, Cambridge and I was encouraged to buy a gigantic sofa. It had a small garden outside and I look back on it with nostalgia.

Offices from the past help us imagine the workspaces of the future – https://on.ft.com/3XQzn23 via @FT

I have been digesting Tár which we went to last night. Of course, it has great virtues: a picture of an obsessive conductor; it’s beautifully filmed; Cate Blanchett is incredibly impressive in the role; there is much which is intellectually and psychologically convincing, including the change in culture from her being idolized as a maestro to being cancelled for her predatory sexuality.

And yet, I’m afraid that at the same time I found it too self consciously ‘important’, too obviously aimed at the Oscars, and actually more than a bit pretentious. And isn’t there something a bit uncomfortable about its depiction of Tár ?

I got back from my regular Saturday morning visit to the Stepney City Farm farmer’s market to find a news bulletin that they have acquired back the land which was used to construct Crossrail and have now acquired a new 10-year lease from Tower Hamlets.   I didn’t know anything of its history – when it was set up – and like the photograph of the site as was before it became a farm:-

https://stepneycityfarm.org/a-new-lease-of-life/?doing_wp_cron=1673692630.3088359832763671875000

I realised how little I know Hampstead Heath in walking across it from Kentish Town to Kenwood: so extraordinarily unspoilt, so few views of other buildings, so many old trees, creating the brief illusion of wilderness so close to such built-up parts of North London:-

I was unfamiliar with the history of Temple Bar which is easy to miss alongside the majestic St. Paul’s, only reinstated at the edge of the Paternoster Square redevelopment by Sir Robert Finch when he was Lord Mayor.

One can see why it was removed from its original position, bang in the middle of Fleet Street, blocking the traffic. Not much room for trucks:-

It was then removed to Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire, where it languished:-

John Seely of Seely and Paget had an amazing plan in the 1950s to reinstate it at the bottom of Ludgate Hill:-

It now houses The Worshipful Company of Architects, only since September this year:-

I was early for a meeting near St. Paul’s this morning and since I have been reading about Wren in honour of his Tercentenary, particularly James Campbell’s brilliant Building St. Paul’s (not stocked by the bookshop I noticed), I wandered round it, struck as I always am, by the sense of calm orderliness, everything worked out, which is perhaps not surprising given the length of time it took to build, the number of different schemes, and the requirement that it was as much a monument to the restoration of the monarchy as to God:-

Having endured three or four episodes of Marie Antoinette, it was both a relief and provocation to go and see Corsage – a more surreally, ahistorical film, much more sensuously beautiful, which faces the problem of how to film history by not trying to bother about being too correct, including, faintly ludicrously, showing the Empress’s cousin’s English estate (Althorp) somewhere deep in the Transylvanian countryside.

I thought it was a pretty brilliant performance by Vicky Krieps and many of the settings were memorably beautiful – a distant view of a swimming pool with the grassland beyond, an overgrown maze.

As beautiful a sense of a past as it’s possible to imagine, however fictional.