Reading another article about the closure of Old Town Clothing makes me want to weep.  It has been known for nearly a year that the shutters were due to come down, so what has been done to keep it alive ?  Nothing.  That’s because no-one cares about or pays attention to a small, well-run, successful business with a loyal international clientele.  It’s below the radar.

Someone told me recently how much the government spends on overnight accommodation.  A fortune every day.

I feel that government should be interested in small-scale rural production and local businesses which use specialist hand skills.  They are treated as the past, but they ought to, or could, be the future as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/dec/19/goodbye-to-old-town-beloved-utility-inspired-norfolk-clothing-company?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

We went to a screening of Stardust, the very brilliant and extremely moving film which Jim Venturi and Anita Naughton have made about Jim’s parents, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. 

I didn’t know quite what expect, but it is funny, deeply interesting and informative about them as architects, as people, and, most especially demonstrates how horribly badly Denise has been treated, subordinated and and the importance of her role in their partnership underestimated not least, as the film shows, by Bob. 

Philip Johnson comes across as a total monster.  The way they were treated as architects of the Sainsbury Wing is demonstrated only too clearly.  The only person who comes across as understanding and appreciating the Sainsbury Wing and its galleries at the time of its opening is Andrew Graham Dixon who was magnificent in describing its virtues. 

There is another screening on January 21st.  It deserves the widest possible audience.

In case you think I only looked at examples of Norwegian modernism, I post a picture of the Royal Palace, constructed between 1 October 1825 and 26 July 1849: a fine example of Nordic neoclassicism surrounded by a public park:-

I didn’t include the Henie Onstad Art Center in my book on modern art museums because at the time I didn’t know about it: a new museum designed from scratch by Norwegian architects, Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen, paid for by Sonja Henie who had made a fortune from Olympic ice skating.

I thought it was particularly interesting in that it combined music and art and indeed is as important in the history of music as for its art exhibitions, including early concerts by Stockhausen and John Cage.

Henie Onstad was herself obviously closely involved in the project, including the choice of a dark red carpet from California.

Its aesthetic seems to have belonged to its proximity to the original site of Oslo airport, using materials and manufacturers employed in the design of aeroplanes.

Here it is under construction:-

From the rear:-

The entrance as it is now:-

The central staircase:-

And the palette of materials :-

I spent yesterday morning on a tour of the old American embassy building designed by Eero Saarinen, the architect of Dulles International Airport in Washington DC and the ice rink at Yale.  It was a vehicle of American democratic values with a cinema in the basement and a lending library upstairs, as well as a room at the top for the Ambassador to look out over the Royal Palace.  It gradually became more like a fortress behind impenetrable fencing until the Embassy moved out into the suburbs and the Saarinen building was sold to a developer who has devoted immense care to its reconstruction:-

I was pleased to see the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo as a model of an artist-run organisation – the Bildende Kunstneres Styre, now the Norwegian Visual Artists Association.  They acquired a site north of the Royal Palace in 1927 and the competition for a new building was won in 1928 by Gudolf Blackstad and Herman Munthe-Kaas for a building which is essentially modernist, but with classical elements, and two beautiful top-lit galleries on either side of a central staircase.

Picasso’s Guernica was shown there in early 1938 as part of an exhibition of contemporary French painting, MATISSE PICASSO BRAQUE LAURENS and the current exhibition by Dag Erik Elgin is a homage to it.

By chance, I was back in Oxford again today, so took the opportunity of going to see David Kohn’s Gradel Quadrangle on Mansfield Road, a fascinating experiment in mannerism.  You enter (but, of course, I wasn’t allowed to enter) by an exaggeratedly curved pink sandstone porter’s lodge and just beyond the lodge, there is a mystery tower (what does it contain ?), and, beyond the tower, similarly curvaceous, but more restrained Cotswold stone student accommodation with pink edging. 

What to make of it ? 

Well, it maybe suffers from looking a bit too startlingly new, as if it had just popped out of the dressing up box, but it should age well and it lends a lot of character to an otherwise dull bit of Oxford – Mansfield College plus chemistry labs. 

David Kohn is an interesting architect who has worked in Barcelona.  He was one of the candidates to re-do the Sainsbury Wing.  I wonder what people would have thought if he had won.  It’s not exactly Venturi Scott Brown, more Gaudi meets arts-and-crafts.  No more shocking than Keble:-

We loved Conclave which we saw at the Genesis last night: a brilliantly acted film of a papal election whose drama is presumably partly owing to the nature of a conclave and to the use of extraordinarily convincing sets to reconstruct the claustrophobia of the Vatican, but greatly helped by the amazing performances, particularly by Ralph Fiennes.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/01/conclave-review-ralph-fiennes-is-almighty-in-thrilling-papal-tussle-edward-berger-robert-harris-isabella-rossellini-5-stars

I accidentally took a wrong turn from Oxford station and found myself in Bulwarks Lane, a surprisingly old alleyway which apparently used to be called Bullocks Lane after someone in the sixteenth century called Bullock who dumped his rubbish there.  It gives an unexpectedly good view of Austen Harrison’s Nuffield College, which we slightly sneered at when I was a child, but looks pretty good for the 1950s:-

The Queen’s College must be one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere on the bend of Oxford’s High Street, serenely classical.

But the process of its design is curiously opaque.  Hawksmoor made lots of drawings for it while he was working on Blenheim, but they were too ambitious.  Construction of the front quadrangle was done by William Townesend, the head of a family of masons responsible for many of the buildings in Oxford at the time, but it is assumed that his work was either overseen or the original plans were drawn up by George Clarke, a ubiquitous and knowledgeable (and very worldly) Oxford don, who gave his collection of architectural drawings to Worcester:-