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.

   

London

       To a sultry London on Sunday for a few days and hefty dose of culture, and (it could be argued) you can't get more cultural or arcane than an exhibition of Medieval Sienese religious art at the National Gallery.  That was Monday morning.  I intended to post everything in order over the next few weeks or so, but I still need time to form a response to the art on display, so I will have to return to this topic at a later date when my thoughts are clearer.  (You may, perhaps, want to read this 'reluctance' on my part as a tacit admission that I wasn't that impressed, but I couldn't possibly comment.)  the two phots below were taken in Covent Garden on the way to the National Gallery.

     It's funny how on these little trips of mine themes sort of emerge from the serendipitous.  On this particular visit three themes emerged.  The first was Post-Modernism.  After the exhibition, and a visit to the remarkable Maison Berteaux on Greek St., I headed into Covent Garden via Seven Dials to buy a new shirt. I couldn't resist, however, popping into the Ching Court.  A triangular public space formed out of a chaos of backyards and sheds in the centre of the urban block created by Monmouth, Mercer and Shelton Streets - the so-called Comyn Ching Triangle. The result is a beautiful, serene piece of urbanism.  It is an early work (1978-86) by the architect Terry Farrell, combining in a Geddesian manner the old (Georgian terrace houses) and the new (three new architectural interventions - one at each corner).  How one felt the optimism of those heady days when it seemed that Modernism was finished!  I particularly like the detailing of the three wooden porches on the w side of the court.

     Afterwards lunch with a friend who now works for another friend Ben Pentreath, at his rather glamorous studio in Lambs Conduit St. We ate at 'La Fromagerie' over the street from Ben's office.  Quite the best gnocchi I have eaten in a long time.  A rushed supper at 'Hare and Tortoise' in Bloomsbury interrupted by extraordinary behaviour of a diner when her child misbehaved and that left the other diners open mouthed in disbelief.  From there to the Art Workers Guild where RIBA TAG was having a symposium and summer party.  I managed to arrive very late, all the chairs were taken, the speeches dull and the heating was on. I lasted half an hour before leaving.

Own work: sketches towards 'The Great Stone'

 

      I thought I'd share with you the sketches I have made so far as I work towards a new pen and ink drawing 'The Great Stone'.  Hopefully it'll give you a good idea of the process of creating an artwork.

Own work: new Monoprint

      The first complete work I have done in a while, and for that I have to be thankful. However compared to the monoprint I posted last month this is clunking affair, stiff and over drawn. In short a disappointment. 15x12.5 cms, 120 mgs paper.  Monoprint and biro

June

June by John Clare (1793-1864)

Now summer is in flower, and Nature's hum
Is never silent round her bounteous bloom;
Insects, as small as dust, have never done
With glitt'ring dance, and reeling in the sun;
And green wood-fly, and blossom-haunting bee,
Are never weary of their melody.
Round field and hedge, flowers in full glory twine,
Large bind-weed bells, wild hop, and streak'd woodbine,
That lift athirst their slender-throated flowers,
Agape for dew-falls, and for honey showers;
These o'er each bush in sweet disorder run,
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun.
The mottled spider, at eve's leisure, weaves
His webs of silken lace on twigs and leaves,
Which ev'ry morning meet the poet's eye,
Like fairies' dew-wet dresses hung to dry.
The wheat swells into ear, and hides below
The May-month wild flowers and their gaudy show.