An early morning breakfast in the City allowed me to see the Royal Exchange building oddly and unusually without traffic in front.   The original Royal Exchange by Queen Elizabeth I on 23 January 1571.   It burnt down in the Fire and a replacement was designed by Edward Jarman.   It burnt down in 1838. Its replacement was designed by William Tite who mainly designed railway stations, but won the second competition for a grand, classical building against Cockerell, Smirke and Barry:-

Beyond it is the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin and an as yet unnamed tower block currently under construction:-

And the Walkie-Talkie hovers in the early morning smoke:-

I have now had a chance to read Moneo’s lecture in its elegant, printed form and to confirm what I had half realised:  that Moneo compares the contemporary loss of faith and belief in the tenets on the Modern Movement and the move away from the Vitruvian concepts of firmitas, utilitas and venustas to a belief in technological suprematism alone (or anything goes) is paralleled by Soane’s situation at the end of his life:  ‘It is a situation not very different to that of Sir John Soane, when, at the end of his life, from his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he could see that the architectural canon and the language of Classicism were no longer valid and that the new world of architecture was something he wouldn’t recognise’.

I went to hear Rafael Moneo give what was described as the first Soane annual lecture at the Royal Institution, although I thought I had a shelf-ful of earlier ones in the Soane section of my library, and receive the Soane Medal, a replica of the medal that Soane was given in 1835 by ‘the Architects of England’.    It felt like a manifesto, deeply felt and dense with historical references.   There were two things which I will particularly remember.   The first was the way in which Moneo described Soane in the early 1830s at the end of his career mourning the loss of faith in the classical tradition as a younger generation began to experiment with radical pluralism: ‘Soane, who had shown his profound love and respect for Rome in the design of his own home, and his passionate collecting of classical antiquities, was conscious, perhaps with a certain melancholy, that he would represent the end of the deeply nostalgic English architecture that had taken the Eternal City as its inspiration since the time of Inigo Jones’. The second was the extent to which David Chipperfield, who was master of ceremonies and engaged Moneo in questions after the talk, so obviously admired Moneo for his compromise between modernity and the reference to history. He did an exhibition of Moneo’s work in his 9H Gallery in 1986, just at the time of the completion of the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida. It showed the route out from postmodernism, a belief in the more cerebral, as well as material, qualities of building.

I went last night to a discussion about the characteristics of cities in the 2020s which took place under Chatham House rules.   I hope that I am not breaching them by saying that much of the discussion was about the need for devolution and the involvement of the local community if the housing crisis is in any way to be solved;  and that Brexit is likely to make this impossible, because, not least, it involves far too much of the energies of the current government.   One statistic particularly stuck in my mind, which is that in London, 80% of the housing being built is affordable to only 8% of the population:  hardly the way to solve the crisis.

And I enjoyed the staggering view south of central London:-

And of New Zealand House close to:-

I took Ricky Burdett and David Rosen round Burlington Gardens.   Both have been closely involved with the project at different stages – Ricky as a member of the jury in the first competition in 1996, won by Michael and Patty Hopkins, but with David Chipperfield as close runner-up;  David Rosen who was responsible for leasing the ground floor gallery space to Pace.   Ricky’s comment was how unforced it feels as a project, using the existing spaces and enhancing their characteristics, rather than trying to impose new uses on them.    I have never seen David Chipperfield’s entry to the 1998 competition and have often wondered how far it informed the intelligent confidence of his entry to the third and final 2008 competition ten years later:-

By an unexpected coincidence, I was having supper with some friends in Burlington Gardens on Sunday evening just as Sisk was dismantling the great crane which has towered over our two buildings for the last eighteen months at least.   I had annoyingly managed to leave my mobile telephone at home, but borrowed someone else’s iPhone to take a photograph of the last moment of the de-installation.   It felt like a historic moment:-

As the moment of our departure from Blackfriars approaches, I am paying more attention, once again, to our physical surroundings: this morning to the grand Victorian robustness of the underside of Blackfriars Bridge seen from the Embankment, designed by Joseph Cubitt and with metalwork by The Patent Shaft and Axletree Company in Wednesbury. It replaced the eighteenth-century toll bridge designed by Robert Mylne and opened in 1769:-

I went last night to hear Anya Hindmarch, one of the Trustees of the Royal Academy Development Trust, talk about the business of making and selling luxury handbags internationally.   She made it sound charmingly straightforward as the daughter of entrepreneurial parents, travelling out to Florence aged eighteen and ordering some duffel bags which she sold through a feature in Harpers and Queen, opening a shop in Walton Street, and then gradually and incrementally expanding internationally, so that now she has shops all over the world.   I assume that she must have had a great deal more steeliness and determination than she allowed to appear.

I was tipped off by Otto SS that St. Anne’s, Limehouse has joined the Buildings at Risk Register, published last week by Historic England.   Since the structure has always seemed to be in good shape, built of the finest ashlar by Edward Strong and Edward Tufnell as masons, and since a great deal was spent in the 1980s through the construction of a new roof structure, overseen by Julian Harrap and with funding from the Getty, I wondered what it was that had led to its inclusion.   The answer is that the walls of the interior, which was burnt out in 1850 and then restored by P.C.Hardwick, are indeed very damp:-

Inspired by Jamie Fobert’s talk at the Royal Institution about his work on Kettle’s Yard, I have been reading Jim Ede’s A way of life, his very detailed account of his life and, in particular, his philosophy of eclectic acquisition, how and when he bought – or was given – the objects in his collection, and how and where he displayed them in the cottages in Cambridge which he converted into a single house in 1957.   Not least, I have been interested in the question raised in the Comments of the blog as to whether or not he would have been a better Director of the Tate, had he been available for appointment in 1938 instead of John Rothenstein.   As Alan Bowness writes in the Introduction, ‘He might well have become director of the Tate Gallery in 1938 (and what a difference that would have made !)’.   But admirable, charming and exceptionally visually sensitive as he so obviously was, deeply interested in the mystical communion with works of art and gifted in his associations with contemporary artists in both London and Paris during the 1920s, he doesn’t really come across as someone who would have wanted to be Director.   He writes his own self-assessment:  ‘At that time, 1928-1938, I thought I knew myself.   I had a profound feeling for the essence of life of which I felt mysef to be a part.   ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, so how could I despair ?  I knew what sort of fool I was and what sort of fool I wasn’t.   I knew I had little brain and much heart’.