I’m an admirer of the John Hancock Tower and always have been: post-brutalist, it provides an elegant and sleek reflective presence to the Boston skyline, always there, but never domineering, tactfully deferential to H.H. Richardson’s wonderful Trinity Church. It was designed by Henry Cobb, working in partnership with IM. Pei:-
I nipped out first thing in the morning to catch the early morning light on Boston Public Library, McKim Mead and White’s great classical monument to the idea of public learning, with the names of all the great writers boldly inscribed on its façades. Charles McKim had been at Harvard – of course – and had been apprenticed to H.H. Richardson. Based on Alberti and Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Ste. Geneviève in Paris, it represents the turn to classicism in American architecture:-
No signs of the election, of course (elections are fought in the head), apart from a few crazies outside the Boston Public Library:-
Much more impressive than City Hall, although also much bleaker, is Paul Rudolph’s Government Service Center. Rudolph was the chair of the architecture school at Yale and designed the building in the manner of an Italian town (not my idea of an Italian town). The complex is said to demonstrate all the characteristics of his style – ‘rough-aggregate corrugated surfaces, rhythmically repeated piers, overhanging cornices, and sculpturally articulated service cores, multiplying the Brutalist aesthetic close to a point of delirium’:-
I was reading on the aeroplane about the glories of Boston City Hall – the importance of preserving it as a monument to the heroic days of city government. I didn’t remember ever seeing it, although in some ways it is hard to miss: a grand and neo-expressionist piece of concrete sculpture, which has thus far resisted demolition:-
I wish I had acquired the habit of walking when I was in Boston in 1976. I always regarded Boston as a distant city, to be reached only on the T, so never got to know the pleasures of Beacon Hill – its steep brick streets and Federal houses, home of the brahmins. This afternoon I walked up Mt. Vernon Street and enjoyed the shabbiness of its Greek Revival detailing:-
I meant to find out about J.P. Gandy Deering yesterday, wondering about his role assisting Wilkins in the design of University College. The answer is that he was the younger brother of the great J. M. Gandy, draughtsman to John Soane (their father was a waiter at White’s Club). A pupil of James Wyatt, he was trained at the Royal Academy Schools, exhibiting A Design for the Royal Academy in 1807. After travelling to Greece on an exhibition organised by the Society of Dilettanti, he collaborated with Wilkins on the design of an 820 foot tower planned for Portland Place and on the design of the University Club in Pall Mall. He actually came second in the competition for University College, but then assisted Wilkins in the execution of his winning entry. In 1828, he inherited an estate in Buckinghamshire from his friend Henry Deering, took his name, and more or less gave up architecture.
As I walked back to the underground from Birkbeck, I wandered through the labyrinth of University College and found myself in its entrance courtyard, admiring William Wilkins’s great neoclassical façade, done in conjunction with J.P. Gandy-Deering after the founding of the college in February 1826 and much more effective as an architectural composition than the later National Gallery:-
I was asked to speak this afternoon at a conference on the theme of ‘Can culture replace God ?’, which was good for the mind if not for the spirit. Much of the discussion was on the severence of culture from religion, beginning in the eighteenth century with Voltaire and extending to the writings of Lessing, Kant and Hegel and the ways in which the Romantic poets replaced the experience of religion with transcendental subjectivity and the worship of nature. I wasn’t able to contribute to this part of the discussion, but I was able to supply information and statistics on the ways in which the rise of going to museums has paralleled the decline in going to church. After my lecture at South Creake last month, I discovered that the Royal Academy undertakes market research on the extent to which visitors regard going to an exhibition as the equivalent of going to church: 32% of visitors view exhibitions as an opportunity to stimulate the imagination; 29% as an opportunity to reflect or contemplate; and 25% for inspiration. Art may not be able to provide a satisfactory meaning for existence (and nor nowadays does going to church), but it can, as in the work of Kiefer, provide an experience of the transcendent.
More discussions about how to ensure that art history does not die as an A Level subject in 2018. It has become clear that the issue is much broader than simply retaining art history as an A level subject, currently mainly in private schools: that is, how to ensure that there is at least some teaching and awareness of art history in state schools more generally, not just at A Level, in order to ensure visual literacy. At the moment, anecdotal evidence suggests that pupils are introduced to ideas about art history in Primary Schools. Then, there is a requirement that pupils should learn about art history as a part of Key Stage 3. But does this actually happen ? The big loss is the reduction in the amount of art history which is taught as a part of art and design education since artists are no longer expected or necessarily encouraged to know about the past.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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