I have been cogitating about Villa Jones, not least because it is a pleasure to be in a set of designed spaces, a microcosm of Ed Jones’s attitude to design and planning, each space very carefully articulated through an overall geometry, which is a bit playful, like a Corbusian playing jazz.

It must have been designed more or less at the time the Ondaatje Wing was nearing completion – he and Margot bought the site in 1999 and work was completed in 2003, the Ondaatje Wing opened in May 2000 – and I recognise some of the same characteristics of intelligent formal geometry in its planning.

There is one particularly nice side comment in Ed’s description of the house in his and Jeremy Dixon’s detailed and comprehensive account of their work: ‘I remember James Gowan once commenting that proportion in a building came free and was not vulnerable to cost cutting. In the same spirit I am aware that shadows cast from the pergola of this house evoke memories of Adolf Loos’s marvellous black and white striped house for Josephine Baker of 1927, and cannot be ‘value engineered’ away’.

This is maybe a reference to a day spent on value engineering the Ondaatje Wing – what Ed called ‘the group grope’: a day when consultants spent a day trying to reduce costs by stripping out some of the quality and character of the project. Not a good experience. So, a private project was exempt from these disciplines/restrictions and could be free, with a generosity, as well as syncopation, in its ground plan – hence the quality of the result.

I have been reading the analysis of the Villa Jones by the late Bob Maxwell in Dixon Jones 2:  Buildings and Projects 1998-2019, published last year.  I had not known that the planners objected to the square end as being contrary to the local vernacular which required a visibly expressed pitched roof.  Maxwell describes how Le Corbusier in practice liked the way buildings, like objects, evolve into object types, as with the bicycle and briar pipe (this is apparently described by Charles Jencks in his book on Le Corbusier). Luckily, Bâtiments de France could see that the building was an intelligent balance of modernism and localism – ‘un mélange réussi de la modern avec la vernaculaire’.

This is the Corbusian end the planners objected to, before it was masked by vegetation:-

A view of the house from the north demonstrating the linearity of its layout within the olive groves:-

And a nice touch of blue:-

We have been to the Villa Jones once before, but not for ten years at least, and had forgotten its architectural purity on a steep hillside north of Bargemon: each of the interior spaces beautifully composed on a grid, all with distant views across the valley towards the Massif des Maures. It’s a homage not just to Le Corbusier and the machine-à-habiter, but to an older tradition of Edwardian landscape gardening – Cecil Pinsent’s Villa Le Balze above Florence and Shepherd and Jellicoe’s Italian Gardens of the Renaissance. You can rent it and I can’t recommend it more highly.

https://www.villajones.com/

I have done a piece for the August/September issue of The Critic on the subject of gaslighting. At the same time that Westminster City has spent £2 million on a carnival mound disfiguring Marble Arch, they are quietly sending workmen round the back streets of Westminster getting rid of gaslighting, which it always had since the first gas lights were installed in Pall Mall in January 1807. There has been no debate or discussion round this. They probably thought no-one would mind. I can now attach the photographs I took in St. James’s Park, the Mall and off St. Martin’s Lane of historic gaslights which are, not surprisingly listed.

It will not surprise readers of my blog that Historic England have not apparently objected to the change.

St. James’s Park:-

The de luxe version in the Mall:-

Cecil Court:-

And the amazing Goodwin’s Court, if you want a real taste of surviving Victorian London:-

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/august-september-2021/gaslighting-london/?s=09

I had completely forgotten how wonderful the carving is in the tympanum of the Cathédrale St.-Lazare in Autun: so early, so full of life – and signed by Gislebertus underneath the feet of Christ:-

To the right (Christ’s left) is the Archangel Michael:-

And Satan (I hope I’ve got this right):-

More great carving of the capitals, which look, to my untutored eye, to be by different hands.

This must be Noah’s Ark:-

And Simon the Sorcerer descending head-first to hell:-

A treat….

We visited L’Hôtel-Dieu with its wonderful big room for the sick with cubicles constructed by Maurice Ouradou of the Monuments historiqeues in 1876, following an inventory of 1501:-

A magnificent late medieval painted roof:-

Even if some of the detailing is nineteenth-century revival, it’s done very beautifully:-

Such an amazing Rogier van der Weyden, Last Judgment, commissioned by Nicolas Rolin in 1443 for the Hospices:-

Not a bad place to be vaccinated:-

The cathedral at Laon is so wonderful, high on a hill above miles of flat agricultural landscape and visible from far off on the autoroute, gradually acquiring definition as one approaches:-

Early Gothic, late twelfth century, beautiful carving, perfect interior:-

We made it to France – in spite of all the difficulties, the requirement to quarantine, the forms that have to be filled up, the need to show that we’ve been double vaccinated, we travelled in trepidation, amongst relatively few who are likewise brave or foolish, through the tunnel into the wide open spaces of Picardy, lunch in Laon, down to Beaune: it felt how it was pre-EU, an adventure, full of unknowns and uncertainty. But we’ve survived so far.

I have been alerted to the listing of the 25 most significant works of post-war architecture in this morning’s New York Times, selected by, amongst others, Annabelle Selldorf, recently selected to review and revise the Sainsbury Wing.

It’s an intriguing parlour game: starts off conventionally with the Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building, doesn’t include the Guggenheim Museum or Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House, but does include her SESC Pompéia; includes obvious icons like Sydney Opera House and the Centre Pompidou; is pretty thin on the 1980s and 1990s, apart from Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals; then, no doubt rightly, goes global and anti-canonical, including Amanda Williams in Chicago. A snapshot of current mainstream architectural taste.

https://nyti.ms/2WBI5GQ

I was asked to speak today at the new EA Festival, held in the grounds of the castle at Castle Hedingham. It was such a pleasure to be in a tent instead of on Zoom. I had nearly forgotten the pleasures of interaction with a live audience – the feeling of audience engagement and response.

The Castle is Norman. Between 1713 and 1719, much of the castle’s surrounds were demolished and a small Georgian house built in their place with ornamental grounds which half survive:-