Cambridge : St Bene't

      Another theme of my recent trip to London is, oddly, establishment Anglicanism.  Earlier in our day in Cambridge we had visited Great St Mary, the University Church.  A busy and worldly sort of place. You can't much more 'establishment' than that, and where in the second half of the 20th century five of the parish priests become bishops and one a cathedral dean.  St Bene't (yes, that is the correct spelling) I think qualifies, having the future archbishop Ramsey as vicar at one point.

      It stands below the level of the street, at the junction of Free School Lane and St Bene't St., a low unassuming structure similar in that respect to the nearby St Edward's church.  The whole urban fabric at this point rather picturesque; to the east of the church, across Free School Lane is a group of timber framed houses one of which was a cheap'n'cheerful Greek restaurant popular with students.  I remember sitting in there on a particularly cold winter's day, lunchtime it was ,with the bf - we were about the only customers - when it began to snow.
      Between c1352 & 1580 St Bene't also served not only as parish church but chapel to Corpus Christi College next door, and as at Little St Mary a gallery was constructed between the two, tethering the church to the college.  (St Mary the Less, and St Bene't were not alone in being parish churches that also served as collegiate chapels St Michael and St Edward and the lost St John Zachary) The glory of this church is architectural, being the tower which is Anglo-Saxon. I think it makes St Bene't's the oldest building in Cambridge.  Inside the tower arch survives and is a charming, cack-handed attempt at Classicism.  On the whole, though, the interior is a little on the bleak side, for me.  It lacks a certain mystery, but is pleasant enough. Of the furnishings the font is good, as are the benefaction boards.  And that, as far as I can remember is, that.

July

 

July by John Clare (1793-1864)

July the month of summers prime
Again resumes her busy time
Scythes tinkle in each grassy dell
Where solitude was wont to dwell
And meadows they are mad with noise
Of laughing maids and shouting boys
Making up the withering hay
With merry hearts as light as play
The very insects on the ground
So nimbly bustle all around
Among the grass or dusty soil
They seem partakers in the toil
The very landscape reels with life
While mid the busy stir and strife
Of industry the shepherd still
Enjoys his summer dreams at will
Bent oer his hook or listless laid
Beneath the pastures willow shade
Whose foliage shines so cool and grey
Amid the sultry hues of day

Leon Krier 1946 - 2025

      A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country, and his own house.

      It is nearly a week now since the death was announced of the visionary architect and planner Leon Krier.  For most of his life he was a prophet in his own country and largely without honour.  Certainly he was disliked within his own household of architecture by plenty in the profession and associated journalists. I think he may have been held in suspicion by some of the few traditionalist architects working in the UK at the time.  One of the reasons for this was stylistic; Krier's classicism was like nothing else, and it certainly was not 'English', certainly not the early 19th century Neo-classical rectory ideal.  Unlike them LK was a polemicist - a rather ungentlemanly thing, perhaps - happy to take the war to the enemy. And then there was his implacable hostility to compromise; 'I am an architect because I don't build', he claimed.  He was suspected of having private income, and his desire for a better 'work-life balance'.

     Leon Krier was born in 1946 in Luxembourg in a Europe damaged by war and beginning a process of reconstruction.  And I suppose it was that process of rebuilding, and its manifest failures, that contributed to his conversion from Modernist to Classicist/Traditionalist. In 1968, after a year at the University of Stuttgart reading architecture, he moved to London and the office of James Stirling. He stayed for some four years before striking out on his own.  At this point architecture had reached a crisis and 'the ever more militant conservation movement suddenly found itself standing victorious over the collapsed remnants of the Modern Movement.'*
      As I wrote earlier this month about the optimism that a scheme such as the Comyn Ching Triangle evoked.  I think the 197/80s was an exciting time in London architecturally.  Change was in the air.  LK was part of this. There was the regular column in Andreas Papadakis's AD Magazine.  At a time when Hugh Cumming was editor.  Yes, I think it was that monthly that got me hooked on his work, the designs also and those clever cartoons.  LK had a very direct way of communication.  And there was the flat in Belsize park where he lived with his then wife the artist Rita Wolff.  I went there a number times and it really was something.  I suppose it was, and perhaps still is, one of the most sophisticated spaces I 've yet experienced.  In the early-ish 1980s I rather cheekily wrote to him to see if he would be kind enough to look over my work. I was invited down to London and his flat.  I suppose he was the first intellectual I had met.  Thankfully there was ego at at work and he kind and generous - not only with his time (we talked for hours, only taking a break because he had a piano lesson), but with his books.  I left with three!  As you may know I went on to Kingston Poly (as was) to read architecture.  It was not a good place for me.  There was barely any formal education, and it had an intellectual life like - well, I don't remember one.  I became withdrawn and isolated and that meant amongst other things that shamefully I failed to maintain by friendship with LK, when it may have been in part at least, an antidote to life at Kingston.  I still regret my stupidity.

* 'Scottish Architeture'. Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie.  Thames & Hudson, 2004

Own work: The Great Stone

 Finally got my latest pen and ink drawing complete.  We are having a difficult time of it, with illness in the family.  The'Great Stone' is 9.2x22.cms, ink with pencil under drawing, on 250g/m Bristol.

Cambridge: The Round Church I

      Cambridge and the limit of our wandering, the church of the Holy Sepulchre, aka The Round Church. The second theme of my trip away, churches with round naves.  They are as rare as hen's teeth in England, there only being four left.   A fifth example, the chapel of Ludlow Castle, is in ruins.  There is one, in ruins, in Scotland (though there is mention of one at Roxburgh but I can't find any corroboration of that) and none in Wales as far as I know.  These structures were built as mimetic representations of the church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem (known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the West)

   This particular example dates from 1130s onwards.  It consists of two parts: the circular nave, and the chancel with n & s aisles. A bit on the dull side, the latter. The rotunda is Norman, and the east end was remodelled in the 15th century, when a bell stage was also added atop the nave clearstory.  In the midst of the 19th century the church was given a thorough going over by Anthony Salvin (1799-1881).  His reconstruction of the nave may not be entirely accurate but is visually satisfying. 

Adelstrop

Adelstrop by Edward Thomas 1878 - 1917

Yes, I remember Adelstrop -
The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform, What I saw

Was Adelstrop - only the name.

And willows, willow-herb and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still, and lonely fair,

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang,

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Cambridge: John Outram at the Judge Business School

      

      Cambridge Tuesday, and my friend Penny - as bold as you like - and an unexpected visit to the Judge Business School on Trumpington St.  And what an extraordinary, exuberant  building this is.  A marriage of former Victorian hospital and exuberant Post-Modernism.  The architect of the former Matthew Digby Wyatt and of the latter the maverick British architect John Outram (1934-).  I feel I should apologise for the use of the 'M' word here, but what other could I use? Outsider?  Both are some utility here, and yet neither are entirely satisfactory.  Outram is perhaps an architect cast in a very British mould. 'A great individualist,' to use a phrase of Sir John Betjeman, and that takes courage.  Especially when architectural education is aimed at compliance and uniformity.  He is perhaps like one of those 'Rogue Architects' of the Gothic Revival, there is, after all, a large element of 'Structural Polychromy' in Outram's work.  One feels that he has read and absorbed any number of theorists - Ruskin, I suspect, and French writers such as Blondel and Perrault.  To hear him talk is to realise he is very widely read.  His knowledge esoteric and arcane, and his buildings are freighted with a deeply personal and elaborate symbolism.  As one critic has remarked he is that rare thing among contemporary British architects: a theorist.  All a long way from the materialist culture of Modernism.

     At the centre of the Outram's scheme is an immense trapezoid atrium - 'The Gallery' - linking the original building to a series of additional structures also by Outram.  It is a complex space, with stairs leaping from one side to another, not that easy to comprehend at first, but clarity comes as you ascend.  (A bit clunky these details btw.)  It is essentially a Hypostyle Hall as one one find in an Ancient Egyptian temple such as Karnak; an evocation also of its derivative, the Vitruvian Egyptian Hall, and the 'Primitive Hut' of Abbe Laugier.  It is also a sort of grove; a Sacred Grove, perhaps. It reminds me also, in its sublime verticality and ratio of void to solid, of a Gothic cathedral, which of course is just another sort of grove. A word about the solid, the columns, they are in fact hollow, the conduits for the services, electricity and such like. They have been termed the 'Sixth Order'; Outram, I believe, refers to them as the Robot Order - the 'Ordine Robotico'.  They have black bell capitals, and bare the most complex and stylish entablature.  The entablature, according to Outram, is a sort of fictive raft, its cargo here is the painted ceiling.  Some of the detailing seems influenced Louis Kahn, some of it by Josef Plechnik, like the balustrade to the roof garden.
     In a lecture on YouTube which Outram gave back in the day at The Architectural Association he talks about the origin of architecture as a housing for, well, the gods and heroes (though he doesn't name them as such), and how over time these primordial structures have become buried (the 'Cataclysm of Domesticity') in the city: "What happens, you see, that these as it were perfect buildings which also have a very big scale, these perfect buildings they just show a little vestige, you know. This is just showing its face, everything else is covered....now you see the idea that you have these kind of jewel-like perfect buildings buried inside a sort of mass of pragmatic structures, runs through even into formal, formally ordered plans...."  Indeed.  I suppose that he was trying, in some sense, to recapture the Pre-Modern pragmatic City. The city as palimpsest.  And in doing so invents for the site a mythic history, creating a modern structure that aspires to the primordial; a building that in some respects defies categorisation.  And one that critics are yet to come to terms with.