I have seen Rafael Moneo’s LA Cathedral once before and remember being impressed by its sense of confidence and intellectual authority. Now it is juxtaposed with Gehry’s concert hall, it is like the yin and yang of contemporary architecture: Moneo also asymmetric and not without a sense of ostentatious performance, but more monumental and meditative, as it should be, with alabaster windows to keep out the fierce Los Angeles sun:-
I remember Frank Gehry giving a speech in the Banqueting Hall – I thought in connection with the Pritzker Prize, but he won it too long ago (it was when he won the RIBA gold medal in 2000) – in which he demonstrated the extraordinary fluency and fertility of his invention, the range of the projects he was undertaking, and the ways in which computer-aided design had unleashed his creative juices. But seeing his designs on a screen is as nothing to seeing the Walt Disney Hall fresh in the early morning sun after two days of rain, a curious but effective combination of populism (bugger the modernists), swagger and a Richard Serra-like interest in pure form:-
I spent the afternoon in the Broad Museum, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (who did the ICA in Boston) and opened in September 2015. I was extremely impressed by it: the quality of the building, with a mobile exterior skin (fiberglass reinforced concrete), very organic shapes and surfaces in the entrance hall and escalator, and huge and generous, top-lit galleries, which can ostensibly be reconfigured, but are effectively permanent; and the quality of the permanent collection, holding works by major postwar artists, like Twombly, Jasper Johns and Beuys, in great depth.
The skin:-
The interiors:-
Given that I am staying in a hotel downtown, I thought I should explore the ostensibly revived downtown and had been encouraged to check out The Bradbury Building, which is indeed an astonishing survival of late Victorian, goldrush LA. It was conceived by Lewis Bradbury, a goldmining millionaire, who commissioned a local architect, Sumner Hunt. But the detailed design is said to be the work of George Wyman, a draughtsman in Hunt’s office. Whoever did it, it’s impressive:-
I didn’t have time for more than a whistlestop tour of the Getty’s exhibition of the work of Bouchardon last night and was principally struck by the astonishing neoclassical bust of Baron Philipp von Stosch, done in 1727 when Bouchardon was a student at the French Academy in Rome. I had not realised that Stosch supplemented his income by acting as a spy for George II; nor that, when he was unmasked as a spy in 1731, he moved to Florence where he established a Masonic lodge in 1733 which in turn led to the ban on Freemasonry by Pope Clement XII on the ground that the Lodge in Florence was a hotbed of Rosicrucian speculation. Stosch was described by Compton Mackenzie as ‘an expatriated Prussian sodomite’, but it doesn’t say this on the label.
I only saw bits of the Getty yesterday in flitting from building to building in between meetings, so wasn’t really able to take in the complex geometry of Richard Meier’s hilltop city, its separate buildings mirroring the different functions of the institution, and the vistas everywhere of the valley below. Banham was on the nine-person committee which selected Meier as architect in October 1984 (Stirling was in the last three):-
I should have said that I owe a deep debt of posthumous gratitude to Reyner Banham who I never met, although I heard him lecture with exceptional fluency about building technology (I mainly remember the bootlace tie). After his premature death, the Design History Society wanted to organise an annual commemorative lecture and I was the person who made the arrangements, which broadened my horizons and brought me into contact with Mary (née Mullett), his remarkable widow, who he married in 1946 and incidentally drew the maps for the Los Angeles book. The lectures were published by Jeremy Aynsley under the title The Banham Lectures: Essays on Designing the Future in 2009.
I took the opportunity of a long haul flight to Los Angeles (and standing in line for immigration) not just to finish Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, but to re-read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies which I probably first read when I visited LA in the mid-70s. I was surprised how well it had stood up as a way of writing about a city, as much a study in historical geography and sociology (he was writing for New Society at the time) as it was a conventional architectural history or, as it is remembered, a love letter to the city by a hitch-hiking professor in love with pop culture who was ideologically moving west.
I finished reading Notes from Walnut Tree Farm on the flight to Los Angeles and have now completed my crash course in the works of Roger Deakin: sad to realise that he died ten years ago aged 63, so should have had twenty more years at least of rambling, meditative, descriptive writing about Suffolk and other places – his jottings on trees, insect life, memories of his north London childhood, travels in his Citroen, and things seen. Of the Australian writer Eric Rolls, he says that he writes ‘in a series of anecdotes and portraits that accrete bit by bit into a whole picture’ and that ‘his technique is disobedient in the best sense, for being his own man when it comes to writing’. He might have been writing about himself.
I know Hyde Park much better than I do Kensington Gardens, so took the opportunity of the closure of Lancaster Gate underground station to explore the area round Queensway, including Kensington Gardens, damp, grey and atmospheric on a wet Saturday morning, and including a curious mix of its original formal geometry, as originally laid out by George London and Henry Wise of the Brompton Nurseries, enlarged by Henry Wise for Queen Anne, and then adapted by Charles Bridgeman for Queen Caroline between 1727 and 1731, with grand avenues leading to Kensington Palace, dogs and big rotting trees:-
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