We went on a morning walk up Dovedale, punctuated by talks about the trees by Thomas Pakenham, the great tree expert. We began with the ash and the alder and a description of the difference between natives and invaders post-1500. Then we had information about the origins of the Horse Chestnut – the false belief that it had come from Istanbul whereas it really came from the border of Greece and Albania. And about the resilience of limes and their ability to reseed themselves:-
After a performance on the cinema organ (not by him), Christopher Frayling gave a talk about his friendship with Angela Carter in Bath in the early 1970s. They shared a common interest in Gothic fiction. Chris had done a Ph.D at Cambridge on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was writing a book on vampyres. Angela Carter was a young writer, writing the stories which became The Bloody Chamber. They tried to persuade Bath City Council to erect a plaque to the fact that Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein in Bath and used to go to Bristol together to watch early Hollywood horror movies. She recorded their conversation in a notebook. The question everyone wanted to ask was if they had an affair. We thought not, only because the character in The Lady in the House of Love who is quite obviously based on Christopher and travels to Romania in search of Bram Stoker is described as young and innocent.
I have been once before to the surreal garage on a hill on the edge of the Peak District which contains the best and most spectacular collection of cinema organs. Even a second time, it makes a big impact:-
I went last night to an exhibition of paintings by Duncan Macaskill, a Scottish artist who has been working away for the last forty years since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1966, only occasionally sending postcards of his work to the outside world. Now he has been taken up by the Vigo Gallery in Dering Street and his paintings are as fresh as if they were painted yesterday:-
I was walking down York Way north of King’s Cross and realised that it has one of London’s ghost underground stations, opened in December 1906 to serve the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. It closed in September 1932. I am surprised that it hasn’t re-opened now that it is one of London’s property hotspots. It’s got odd, wobbly lettering:-
I spent the morning with the Trustees of the Royal Academy and of Royal Academy America in Antony Gormley’s studio in north London. He reminded us of how and why the studio had been designed by David Chipperfield: that he had visited the RIBA in 1990 in search of a young architect to help work on his house; and had (rightly) picked out Chipperfield on the basis of his attention to qualities of interior space and light. The studio has these qualities, but also an attentiveness to proportion:-
As I was getting money out of the cash machine, I saw a building I have seen a thousand times lit up in the evening sun. It’s the former Royal Insurance building on the corner of Piccadilly and St. James’s Street, designed by J.J. Joass of Belcher and Joass, a Scot from Dingwall who trained in Glasgow and who seems to have imbibed some of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s adventurous indiscipline. As Pevsner says – or maybe it is Simon Bradley – ‘the indiscipline must be considered a positive quality. The endeavour here was clearly to smash up the classical conventions, but the fragments are left in a restless disquieting pattern’:-
My latest bulletin on the progress of works in Burlington Garden involves a walk outside the so-called laboratory galleries at the back, looking up at the temporary roof in the middle of a thunderstorm:-
I poked my camera through a hole in the awning to take a photograph of the lantern over Sidney Smirke’s Octagon:-
This year’s Architecture Room in the Summer Exhibition is on the theme of The Unbuilt, a good way of encouraging architects not to use the exhibition as an advertisement for their new work, but to encourage them to show their more conceptual thinking. For example, I hadn’t seen David Chipperfield’s entry for the new set of cultural buildings in the Olympic Park, which he presented as a set of conceptual blocks made out of jesmonite:-
There’s a neo-1960s house on stilts designed by Richard Rogers:-
I was wandering down Bond Street on Saturday morning trying to remember why the Time & Life Building is regarded as of such significance. Part of it, of course, is the presence of four grand abstract sculptures by Henry Moore set into the wall to the side of the building:-
The rest of the building is a rather bland and neutral American-style, postwar office block:-
That is precisely its significance: that it was built with dollars in the early 1950s as a mark of Anglo-American friendship, designed by Michael Rosenauer, a fashionable Austrian architect who was a friend of Oliver Messel and worked for Cecil Beaton before the war. The interiors were by Hugh Casson and Misha Black.
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