'Quartet in Autumn' by Barbara Pym

        A week or so ago, I finished Barbara Pym's late novel 'Quartet in Autumn' - a book I have been meaning to read for some time now; a fragment of a wider and perhaps now lost  Anglo-Catholic culture.  (After  dipping into Mervyn Peake's behemoth 'Titus Groan' I am now currently reading the patrician 'The Soldier Philosophers' by Anthony Powell.)
As you may remember I have written about 'Quartet in Autumn' before when I was reviewing Paul Scott's panoramic and intricate 'Jewel in the Crown', set in the final years of the British Raj. 

     Both writers had been shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - Scott for 'Staying On' set in Post-Independence India, and Pym for 'Quartet in Autumn'.  Both writers were deserving of public recognition, but the prize went to Scott who was by then not only an alcoholic but dying of cancer. He was to ill to be present at the award ceremony and died four months later in March 1978. Pym at the time was in remission from breast cancer, but it returned and she died in early 1980.  
      'Quartet in Autumn' was conceived in the wake of her diagnosis and treatment in 1971,  when she was working in the office of the International African Institute in London, and it was the first of novel of hers to be published since 'No Fond Return of Love' in 1961.  Early on in the book, in language that reflects the opinion of various publishers, there is a description of the sort of novel that one of the main characters is looking for: 'She had been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.' 

    All of that changed, however, in the mid '70s when, following an article in 'The Times Literary Supplement', there was a shift critical opinion, with 'Quartet in Autumn' being published in 1977, followed by 'The Sweet Dove Died' in 1978.  Four novels were published posthumously.

      'Quartet in Autumn' is the story of four co-workers who share a single office.  They are all roughly the same age and are all facing retirement. The office is in some un-named and un-described organization in central London, in the early '70s.  Faceless perhaps, I suppose.  I suspect, though, it is some form of institute of higher education, possibly in Bloomsbury. There are two men, Edwin and Norman, and two women, Letty and Marcia, one of whom, Marcia, has, like Barbara Pym herself, undergone a mastectomy. What any of these four does exactly is a mystery, or rather an irrelevance, as this novel is, apart from the impending fear of old age - loneliness, illness, and death, essentially about those bonds that develop between people who have been thrown together in the workplace - people no doubt that wouldn't have naturally formed friendships - and what happens to those relationships where circumstances change, and how much we owe to them.

     Pym is the chronicler of the mundane, of lives that have not been successful according to the world.  The depicter of the precarious life, the life lived in the bedsitter or the rented room, of the small pleasure.  A sense of the inadequate and the failure pervades her work,  of roads un-adopted where 'removed lives, loneliness clarifies'.

The National Gallery: Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350 Part One

Apologies for the tardiness of this post.  We are still in the midst of family illness.

Introduction

   I feel I should have done some research before going to this exhibition, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and The National Gallery in London.  It would certainly have helped, for although filled with beautiful and lustrous images, this is a hard exhibition to take in.  As I said to a friend later that day over lunch, there is a limit to the number of panel paintings one can take in at one sitting, and I write as somebody who usually loves this sort of thing, but something, for me at least, was not quite right.

'The Art that shaped the Future': Art History in the Age of Stupid?

     For the ignorant, and I think I may include myself in that category, Sienese art of the Middle Ages being a bit esoteric, both galleries have produced introductory videos to the exhibition.

    The Met video features the James Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Painting, Stephan Wolohojian and Caroline Campbell, then Curator of Italian Art at the National Gallery.  At one point Wolohijan said: '[....] in the last years of the 1340s Europe is infested by the Black Death, this great plague that was especially present in Italy, so by the end of our story none of these artists survive."  The implication being they had all died of the plague. This is nonsense. Of the four artists that this exhibition focuses upon, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro may indeed have died of plague, but Duccio died c1318 and Simone Martini died in Avignon in 1344 at the age of 60.  Towards the end of the video Wolohojian stands in front of the beautiful 'Christ Discovered in the Temple' by Simone Martini with its delicate cusped & subcusped Gothic arch and lilting Gothic folds in the clothing of the three figures and says: "No gable, no Gothic form, a truly kind of framed painting, the way you could see made today...." Why do people make such statements like that, when, in this particular context, the exhibition is filled from beginning to end with panel paintings in square frames without 'no gable, or Gothic form'?
     The National Gallery video, grandiloquently subtitled 'The Art that shaped the Future', features, amongst others, a local Sienese artist Chiara Perinetti Casoni, who has it appears a real downer on Byzantine art. (I hate how in order to re-enforce an argument it is done at the expense of something else.)  She seems to speaking from a place of ignorance and one perhaps tainted by a certain anti-clericalism. In common with the other talking heads she presents a view of Byzantine art that is crude and almost unrecognisable.   She implied, for instance, that Byzantine icons were produced solely by religious ie monks.  However, icons were created both in a monastic and secular milieu.  There were professional secular artists in the Empire creating icons in a workshop system that couldn't have been that different from the one operating in Siena. Too much Vasari, and too much Romanticism.  Certainly this whole exhibition is indebted to Georgio Vasari and his book 'The Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects' .

     A claim is made in both videos that the icon tradition is 'rigid', 'rote and stale' and yet icons developed over time just like any other pictorial art, for example the introduction of Chrysography or 'striations'.  Contrary to the impression given, the depiction of the Virgin & Child in Orthodox iconography is not tied to the 'Hodegetria' type, which, according to legend, was established by St Luke the Evangelist.  There are other ways depicting the Theotokos and Child eg. 'Panakranta', 'Pelagonitissa' and most importantly in this context the 'Eleusa'.  According to Wiki it is sometimes referred to the in the West as the 'Virgin of Tenderness'.  Perhaps the most famous example of this type is the Vladimirskaya which dates from c 1130.  So claims that the it was the artists of Siena - 'true artists', mind you - those men, 'whose blood boiled' and 'felt strong emotions' who introduced tenderness & emotion into the dead language of Byzantium have to be taken with a pinch of salt.  Italian artists before Duccio were producing art with emotion; for example there is the work of the Florentine artist Meliore di Jacopo (fl 1255-85).  Two of his paintings spring to mind: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, c 1270-75, and The Enthroned Madonna and Child of the same period.

     But then, sadly, although this exhibition opens movingly with a room of icons from the city, it underplays the role of those images in the religious and civic life of the contemporaneous Italian city: there were, for example, processions of icons in Rome and in the cities of Lazio to the south, and in Siena itself, where in addition the cathedral and San Niccolo al Carmine possessed miracle-working icons of the Virgin Mary.  In researching for this post I soon realised that I knew very little about the cultural spread of Byzantine art in Northern Italy.  The presence of Byzantine culture in Venice I understood, and in southern Italy and Sicily too where there were then still Greek speaking communities worshipping according the Byzantine rite. 

      What, however, was worse about these productions is that virtually no speaker in either video could bring themselves to say 'Byzantine', 'Gothic' or 'International Gothic'.  And these are the categories, the concepts, after all, that exhibition is dealing with. 

     You know, looking at these videos I felt just that bit cheated - I mean, all this people educated - lengthily, expensively, exclusively - talking with all the inanity of a fashion journalist.  PR rules.

    

Sir John Soane Museum

      Just a few snaps which I took of the interior of the Sir John Soane Museum on my last trip to the Smoke.  Hard to think, looking these images just how crowded the museum actually  was.

  The museum is quite the most extraordinary of spaces in London - part house, part office, part museum.  If you haven't been then I strongly suggest you do!  It is a marvel.

'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier

     Since my trip to London and Cambridge I've been in a bit of a PoMo mood. So a fortnight or so ago I treated myself to this book, 'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier, Leon Krier's older brother.  I remember seeing other books by Rob Krier back in the 80s and really I should have bought them at the time, but to my regret I didn't.

     'Elements of Architecture' was first published in 1982, by Academy Editions, and edited by Dr Andreas Papadakis.  I have the 1992 edition.  It quickly established itself as an important text of architectural Post-Modernism, along with 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Stephen Izenour, and Charles Jenck's 'The Language of Post-Modern Architecture' (1977), becoming a set text in many schools of architecture.  Whereas the other two books are largely are theoretical, 'Elements of Architecture' stands in the tradition of books produced by, say, the likes of James Gibbs and Batty Langley in 18th century England, that engage on both a theoretical and practical level with the reader.  They are meant to be a sourcebook of ideas for the designer, and they are essentially pattern books.  And in that Krier's book is no different.  There is however in contrast to, for example, Gibbs's 'Book of Architecture' Krier presents the reader with a series of ideal, slightly Platonic, types - facades, spaces, plans, stairs, etc.  An attempt, perhaps, to establish new typologies of building.  One is therefore tempted to believe that the work Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), the French architect and theorist, is a more pertinent comparison here.  For instance, the 'Rudimenta Opera Magnis et Disciplinae' c. 1790, which seems to have least some influence on Krier's graphic presentation and his vigorous drawing style - which is all together engaging.  In fact, one of the delights of this book are the large colour reproductions of Krier's drawings at the beginning.

     But whither Post-Modernism? It was, I suppose, a short efflorescence - lasting - what? - some twenty years or so. In some respects though its presence has remained, and in recent years there has even been a revival of sorts.  In Britain, for example, we have the 'Blue House' by FAT, the 'House for Essex' by FAT and Grayson Perry, the 'Red House, by David Kohn, and the work of Camille Walala, and Adam Nathaniel Furman.  Most of this is toward the playful end of Post-Modernism. In Italy there is the austere work of Paolo Zermani, with its echoes of Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and the whole Rationalist and Neo-Rationalist schools, and the Scuola Metafisica.
     Sadly, however, I feel this book's lesson will have to learnt all over again by the professionals.  Really, the architectural profession are like the Bourbons: 'They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing'.*

Further reading

'Elements of Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982 &1992

'Rob Krier on Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982

'Architectural Composition' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1988

'Rob Krier: Architecture and Urban Design' (Architectural Monographs No 30), Academy Editions, 1993

'Urban Space, with examples from the city of Stuttgart' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1975

*Usually accredited (and wrongly?) to Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord.  Napoleon called Talleyrand 'that turd in a silk stocking'.

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.  'They', after all, had been at war with the city for years - and continue to be so.  And then there was his implacable hostility to compromise; 'I am an architect because I don't build', he stated.  He was suspected of having private income, and his desire for a better 'work-life balance' was held in suspicion both by Modernist and Traditionalist - how could he be serious?

     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.'*  (Charles Jencks, tongue in cheek perhaps, pinpointed the time and place of the demise of Modernism thus: "Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts)."  That was the moment when the city authorities blew up the Pruitt-Ilgoe housing complex designed by Minoru Yamsaki.)
      As I wrote earlier this month about the optimism that a scheme such as the Comyn Ching Triangle evoked.  I think the 1970s/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 column 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.

Further Reading

'Leon Krier: drawings 1967-1980' Leon Krier, Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1980

'Rational Architecture: The  Reconstruction of the European City' Leon Krier, Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1985

'Architecture: Choice or Fate'  Leon Krier, Andreas Papadakis, 1998

'Drawing for Architecture', Leon Krier, The MIT Press, 2009

'The Architecture of Community' Leon Krier, Island Press, 2009

'Leon Krier: scritti e disegni', Edizione Cluva, 1980, English ed 1984

'Leon Krier: Houses, Palaces, Cities' Demetri Porphyrios, Academy Editions, 1985

'Leon Krier Architecture and Urban Design 1967-1992' Leon Krier, Richard Economakis, David Watkin, Academy Editions, 1992

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

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.

Further Reading

'Terry Farrell' (Architectural Monographs No9), Terry Farrell & Frank Russell, Academy Editions, 1985

Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an ill-assorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.

The National Eisteddfod

     Earlier this week we took the train to Pontypridd in the South Wales Valleys and the National Eisteddfod.  It is the most important arts festival in Wales, and with the Royal Welsh Show the main social event of the Principality. It is a great pity that BBCR3 does not broadcast annually from the Eisteddfod.  It really should as the standard of performers, as we can testify, is excellent.

     The Eisteddfod is a moveable feast, having a different venue each year.  In recent years it has become the custom to divide the Eisteddfod site into a number of Maes (fields) A - D.  We spent our time in Maes A, the outer court of the Temple, the Court of the Gentiles. To be honest I felt somewhat underwhelmed by it all. After a hour and a half I felt ready to leave.  It wasn't that I can speak very little Welsh; this was south Wales and there were at times very few Welsh speakers to be herd; so much so that at one point seeing a rather nice vintage car parked in the middle of the Maes the bf (who has the Welsh) quipped 'Spot a Welsh speaker and win a car!' Only it all felt a little purposeless. There were plenty of exhibitors, such as the National Museum of Wales, the Senedd, and WNO and the NOW, but they were unvisited; the staff sitting around idly browsing their phones. 'Y Lle Celf' - the pavilion of the fine & applied arts - could, at first sight, be described as perfunctory.  However I don't think that would be entirely fair.

     The crepuscular heart of the Eisteddfod is the Pafiliwn, part concert hall and part Telesterion, the Holy of Holies, where the main competitions and the majority of ceremonies take place.  Perhaps it best thought of as a ship's engine deep in the dark and unseen hold of the ship generating meaning and purpose.  It could also be thought of as a womb.  For some reason it was placed - fenced in - at the very southern apex of the site right beside the the noisy A470.  The result was a continual hum of traffic that really wasn't satisfactory for the audience or fair to the performers.
     I've chosen my words deliberately because, like all Arts festivals, the Eisteddfod is a sort of 'Mystery religion' - a secular version of Eleusis.*  'Spilt religion' made visible.  After all it has its own vestments and rituals - initiations and such, and most likely its own taboos.  The speaking of English upon the main stage is perhaps one such.  Certainly as we entered the inner enclosure there was sense of something set apart, that we stood in the presence of something important.  A small but telling point here is the almost total lack of signage; we had no idea where the entrance to the actual Pafiliwn was; perhaps it was sort of knowledge that was whispered to the initiate only.  Oddly, standing in front of that large, blank and somewhat aloof structure I was put in mind of the Kotai Jingu shrine at Ise Jingu in Japan, the holiest site in the nation.  An extreme comparison perhaps.  Rather, it is the Mishkan, the Tabernacle.

     In the end we both agreed we preferred the Royal Welsh Show.  As you may already be able to tell, I certainly felt an ambiguity about the Eisteddfod. Perhaps I shall return, bearing in my mind the secret of a successful visit is to decide what to watch in the Pafiliwn and build your day around that, otherwise it just becomes aimless wandering.  I may even submit a painting or two and see how I get along.

* I think there is tendency in arts festivals towards 'in' and 'out' groups.  It is probably inevitable. I can imagine that this was true of The Aldeburgh Festival in the Britten/Pears years.

Oh Birmingham....

    

  ....what has become of you? Have you really so sunk so low?

     I am talking here about the planning application by Marrons (for HJB Investments) for 80 Broad St, in the city.  I first came across this application in the current edition of 'Private Eye' last week.  It has also been reported on by the BBC and GBNews.  In addition to the 'Eye' it has also featured in other traditional print media such as 'Building Design' and 'Construction Enquirer' - most of these articles are essentially a re-write of a post on the Marrons' website.

 

     To the scheme and it really is a shocker, entailing the proposed construction of a 438ft high tower over the top of a late, rather attractive, Grade II listed, Georgian mansion called, in a couple of on-line articles, 'Islington Villa'.¹  (This end of Broad St was in the beginning of the 19th century known as Islington and Broad St as Islington Rd.)  As far as I can make it both the architect of the villa and the date of construction are unknown; Pevsner says c1830s, while flickr 1814.² It was the home of Owen Johnson, one of the founders of the Islington Glassworks, but most of its life has not been domestic but institutional i.e. a series of hospitals.  In recent years it has been a restaurant and a bar and has since Lockdown been empty.  For all its vicissitudes it is one of the last remaining pieces of the old Broad St. and, with the extraordinary former Broad St Presbyterian Church (1848-9 by J R Botham), perhaps the best bit of architecture going on the street.  And, let's face it, Broad St needs all the help it can get. It abounds in ugliness, but then the whole of the City Centre is slowly sinking into vulgarity. 

     Let's hope this really doesn't get planning permission. Marrons' design will not only set a dangerous precedent should it get permission, but it will do nothing to enhance Broad St while actually demeaning the current structure. 

Great news! As of today (25.04.24) the scheme has failed to get planning permission.  Islington Villa is safe.  For now.

1  The tower, I believe, will be mainly, as the headline on 'Business-Live.co.uk' so elegantly puts it, 'resi'.  That's residential to you and me.

2 The architect of the sympathetically designed wings is however known.  It was John Jones Bateman (never heard of him).  They date from 1863, when 'Islington Villa' was already a hospital.  The railings are also listed.

 

Against the 'Crit'

      I see that a new book has recently been published by Future Cities Project and the Machine Press entitled 'Five Critical Essays on the Crit'.  The 'crit' is the current method of evaluating a students work in schools of art and architecture.  It simply consists of a student presenting their work to a selection of tutors and to their fellow students.

     I have to be honest here and say I have an oar in the boat here, so what I have to say is very likely biased.  I have experienced the 'crit' and not only was it an ultimately boring¹ and futile way to spend time in which nothing is learnt (except conformity), it was for me deeply humiliating. My experience at the then Kingston Polytechnic School of Architecture in the mid to late 80s was at times dreadful. On one occasion a visiting tutor, Fenella Dixon, histrionically declared she would never trust another word I said; on another I was called a 'fascist'.  This was because I attempting to design classical buildings. It was all too much like the bullying I suffered at school, except this time it was by the 'adults in the room', the so-called 'professional' class.  I was deeply unhappy, isolated and struggling and eventually I dropped out. And I am left with the feeling that 'they' got what they wanted.  At times (not that often, thankfully) I still feel deeply embittered by this.  It is unlikely that my experience was an isolated phenomena: the 2020 Howlett Brown Report described The Bartlet School of Architecture as 'an environment that seems to have embraced a culture of criticism and degradation of students'.

     For me there are a number of ways in which the crit fails: firstly, it is a poor, and lazy, way of improving students' communication skills, and, as so often happens in our society, emboldens the the vulgar, the philistine, those who shout loudest and silences the thoughtful, the shy, the sensitive. 
     More importantly the 'crit' prioritises - in fashionable discourse it 'privileges' - the verbal over the visual; failing, thereby, at a fundamental level to understand the creative process (which is often intuitive and unconscious) and the nature of architecture itself.  I would go as far as to argue that this failure of  comprehension, which ultimately is failure of utility and appropriateness, has actually undermined, if not subverted, not only the whole creative process but architecture as a unique art form.  No piece of architecture is ever experienced through the mediation of language.  And it is misleading and dangerous to attempt it.  Architecture is its own language.  It has been likened to frozen music², and this is fitting, for they both exist first and foremost in the worlds of the senses and the spirit.  They exist simultaneously in the Seen and the Unseen, and they highlight the limitations of language.
     As I very briefly mentioned above 'crit' is essentially a means of control. A lot is said recently, rightly, about the ideological capture of institutions, but the truth is that for the last seventy years or so the Schools of Architecture in the UK have been 'colonised' by doctrinaire Modernism.  The crit, with its implicit threat of social shaming, is a method of enforcing ideological submission to Modernism - the Soft Modernity version of the Maoist Hard Modernity 'Struggle Session'. After all, who would want to be humiliated in front of their peers? 
      Ultimately the crit is a deeply corrupting process, a blunt instrument, that damages all involved in the process not just those on the receiving end but those with the power. So much so that I don't believe it can be left safely in anybody's hands, especially the back biting world of academics or professional architects with all their jealousies and in-fighting - even if they are on the side of the angels. It is an open door to misuse, to bullying, to the worst of human nature.

     Time it was abolished

 

1 In my experience students tend to drift away during the course of a crit; come the afternoon of the final day there's usually only a handful left. And who can blame them?

 2 It was Goethe, who said “Music is liquid architecture, and architecture is frozen music.”

 

Decolonisation and the Arts

     The response to the utterly horrific events in Israel have, for me, brought into sharp focus the subject of Decolonisation and its troubling  relationship to the arts. 

     Here in Britain in last couple of years we have seen a number of institutions¹ - collections such as 'The Wellcome Trust' and 'The Pitt Rivers Museum' in Oxford; universities and even the odd Anglican cathedral, for example Chester - embrace 'Decolonialism'.  Only this week 'The British Medical Journal' (aka 'The BMJ') proclaimed on its cover: 'Decolonisation: Why Medicine Needs to be Rebuilt', with the image of  wrecking ball at work. I presume that was meant to unironic, for as Colin Wright tweeted in response:

 

     "Make no mistake, "decolonization" ideology destroys everything it touches. That's the point. In that regard, the wrecking ball imagery is appropriate. However, don't be deluded into believing they have the ability to build anything even remotely functional in its place."

      All of this is part of a wider anti-intellectual movement that, usually referred to as 'woke', that includes greater control, greater censorship and greater puritanism that for an artist such as myself who values his independence it is deeply disturbing.  For this ideology has no use for beauty, no use for the sensuality of mark and surface. Everything is reduced ad absurdum to power and its distribution, and in particular with the concept of 'whiteness'.  Art is itself reduced to the utilitarian status of tool, either of oppression or liberation. It is to be allowed to continue, but with no other role but slavery to the political.  Either way, it is denied both its liberty and its life.  And the art that surrounds us must be humiliated, systematically stripped of its emotive power. The consequence for creativity will be disastrous.
     What lies at the very heart of this attitude to the arts, and which wokeism shares with all other forms of authoritarism, is fear.  The fear of its potency; the fear of its essential 'irrationality'.  The fear of its other aspects such as the formal, the spiritual or the sensual, those enemies of the cause.  It is feared because it cannot simply be trusted.  It will lead astray from the path of purity. For art, in all its myriad forms talks to us in a manner that is beyond words, beyond control. And words, for the whole 'woke' thing, are core.  As the American critic and feminist Camille Paglia has argued for years since the advent of Post-Structuralism language has been privileged over other forms of artistic production, and that leaves little or no place for the unconscious and the intuitive, both of which, I would argue, are essential to creativity. It is not how art is produced or, for that matter, experienced; sculptors or dancers, for instance do not mediate their work through written/spoken language.  The sculpture or the dance is the language - and both communicate things that are beyond the power of  the written or spoken word. 

     And that is the great problem the 'woke', particularly in respect to the arts, it un-natures, un-selves us.  It is a form of Gnosticism, yet another attempt to fill the vacuum created by the death of God with a grand theory of everything that times feels like a conspiracy theory than something with any real intellectual heft. But then perhaps it's not much of a leap from believing that that strange double portrait 'The Cholmondeley Ladies' that hangs in Tate Britain is 'secretly' about whiteness to believing, a la Hamas, that Jews 'secretly' control, amongst a myriad of other things, the world's banks, or that (18/12/23) the fashion chain Zara was trolling the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip in their latest fashion campaign.
      

     While these institutions have been busy practising 'Soft Modernity' the hard stuff, brought to us by a marriage of Islamism and the Extreme Left has been available in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of Oct 9th for all to see. (The divorce, when it comes as it inevitably will, is going to be interesting.) If anything good can come from this terrible mess it that the mask is off and 'Decolonism' has been revealed in all its bloody glory.  The following have been taken from 'X' a week after the events of Oct 7th.
     This golden nugget is from Najma Sharif, a Somali/American writer based, apparently, in the digital world, who does a lot of 'centring' and who thought she could limit those who could see her tweet. Well, there are ways round that!

     "what did y'all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers."

     And this from Sana Saeed, she writes for AJ+, I think, and has taken it upon herself to write for the powerless or something heroic like that. She does bother with capitals either. Talk about edgy!

     "decolonization has never and will never happen in the halls of academia - decolonization is this: the ripping down of walls and taking your freedom by any means necessary. hope all ‘decolonial’ academics who feel uneasy today continue to feel that way."

     Ah yes, any means necessary ie. the raping of women (I presume - and one really shouldn't - that Sana considers herself a feminist) and the killing of children. 

     And here is yet another one of these bourgeois revolutionaries. I give you Jairo I Funes-florez, an academic in Houston, Texas:

'Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories. It’s about a Free Palestine. It’s about liberation and self-determination. It’s about living with dignity. DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR'

Indeed it is not, as the events of these last few days have shown. Not only is it the attempted immasculation of the arts, but far more worryingly it is the dehumanisation of those groups who do not fit neatly into their grievance structure - and this comes from people who would be loudly opposed to 'othering'. It is the rape of women; the abduction of, amongst others, children; the desecration of the dead, and it is genocidal violence.  This is the reality of Decolonisation.   It is all that is condemned in Colonialism and more, because it is essentially nihilistic.  Born of disenchantment it will not liberate us or re-enchant the world merely further our alienation.  All we will be left with are ashes. And yet our institutions are happy to go along with this shit.

1 Not that we should really be that surprised - a lot of this stuff has been floating around academia for decades now. 

The Counter Project

     It is now over 24 hours since an acquaintance of mine, the Irish classical architect and fellow member of RIBA TAG, Conor K Lynch tweeted four images of a counter proposal by 'Apollodorus Architects' for the new rugby stadium in Bath.  In those 19 hours the response has extraordinary: 18,800 likes and counting; 1,948 retweets; 472 comments. The latter have been overwhelmingly positive.  It has certainly caught the public imagination, on Twitter at least.  Of course, there had to be the snarky comment about Albert Speer, Hitler's favourite architect from a practicing modernist(?) architect.  Ah yes, that go to criticism of modern classicism. It really is a tired-out old trope.  It's not even a criticism of the architecture as such, but guilt by association.  Not only is it such a bore, but says much about the intellectual vacuity of the mainstream architectural profession that they should trot some old garbage like that.

    Now for some specifics: the Apollodorus Architects Classical proposal (here) stands counter to the Modernist one designed by Grimshaw (here) for Bath Rugby, who are in need of permanent stadium.  Bath Rugby play on the Recreation Ground - the 'Rec' - just over the river Avon from Bath city centre in Bathwick, that large and unfinished late Georgian development by Thomas Baldwin I wrote about here.  So a particularly sensitive site then when any building on the 'Rec' could be seen from outside the e end of Bath Abbey.  One can also understand the reluctance of the club to leave - they have, after all, played there for decades.  On their website Bath Rugby claims of the Grimshaw design (here): We have created an iconic, yet sensitive design that will deliver an incredible match day experience.  I mean, who writes this shit? 'iconic yet sensitive'?  I'm not even sure what that means. In any case 'iconic', that hideously over used term, is not for Bath Rugby to claim.  I could go on as the Bath Rugby website and in particular their Development Brief, and which has now been formally submitted to Bath & North East Somerset Council, is full of such management speak, but I'll spare you.

     However the use of management speak isn't really the argument here, regrettable though its dominance of the discourse is.  Neither are the merits or otherwise of either scheme my concern, though as an associate member of TAG my sympathies are with the Classical design, which is based on the Roman Amphitheatre at Arles in Provence. Whatever my reservations about the design, and there are some, we have to honest at this juncture and admit it is very unlikely ever to be built if only for the 'mundane' reason that Bath Rugby is nearly an unsustainable £40,000,000 in debt.
     For me the response to this proposal highlights two interconnected phenomena.  Firstly, the growing appeal of Classical/Traditional architecture on social media.  All ready there are any number of twitter streams dedicated to traditional architecture & urbanism, and the culture necessary to sustain them.  Secondly, the continuing gulf between the public and the profession - a gulf that has lasted so far for some sixty plus years. We have a profession that is arrogant and unresponsive to the public.  It has attempted to establish itself as a secular priesthood of true believers. How long must this continue?

'The River'

     More than likely in common with many other households in Britain we have a little ritual every evening after dinner that consists of sitting ourselves down in front of the television picking up the remote control and/or the Radio Times then complaining about the lack of something intellectually, emotionally engaging to watch. The word 'crap' is used. Repeatedly. Night after night, faced as we are by a never ending stream of mediocrity. Invariably we watch a repeat rather than 'live' TV. For months now we have been working the Doctor Who back catalogue. It is a cause of small wonder to me that a series that at times is so dreadful inspires such devotion.

     I really have little sympathy for the 'Defund the BBC' campaign, what after all would replace it? I was lucky enough to grow up during the Golden Age of broadcasting and it has left an indelible and welcome mark on my cultural and intellectual life. I'm looking to revive not remove. However I do wonder if its demise in now inevitable, along with say the mainline Protestant churches and the Universities - particularly the humanities departments. They really are, frankly, fucked. Some museums, newspapers and, here in the UK, the National Trust seem to be heading the same way. All of these organisations have positioned themselves as 'Blue Church'*. The recent BLM debacle post-Covid is not the real agent of this change, but the symptom of a greater cultural decline, which is a failure of purpose rooted in the collapse of narrative and in particular the collapse of religion. We are in the midst of a meaning crisis and Identity Politics, as Douglas Murray as so convincingly argued, is an attempt to establish a new metaphysics, a new meta-narrative. Yet another one, and one (I would argue) that has only intensified the crisis.

     Anyway enough with the pontificating, last week the bf came to the rescue and helped slough off the ennui with this wonderful film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the eponymous novel by Rumer Godden (1907-1998). It is a delight. Engrossing and visually rich. It seemed to me rather like the contemporary work of Powell and Pressburger, a feeling enhanced by the presence of actor Desmond Knight who appeared in a number of the latter's films.

     The setting is India during the British Raj, the time the early 1920s - the aftermath of WWI. Important that. The film is, essentially, the evocative  re-telling of Godden's own admittedly idyllic childhood. Not that it doesn't contain an iron fist in that velvet glove, but to explain that would be to reveal too much of the plot. It does however contain a familiar theme in Godden' work: the emergence from childhood of a young woman, with all its blind rages, joys and losses. A process here initiated by the arrival of a wounded American soldier, who inadvertently brings conflict in his wake as three characters vie for his attentions. The political situation in India as the independence movement gathered pace is handled tangentially. (It does not occur at all in the book.) 

     This will, no doubt, annoy some - but ignore the ire of the woke with all their simplistic puritanical censoriousness. (Intellectually its all pretty fraudulent in any case). Sit back and enjoy this quiet masterpiece. Of the two cinematic adaptations of her work - the other being 'Black Narcissus' - this apparently was Godden's favourite.

* for a definition of the 'Blue Church' and its opposite the 'Red Religion' see the work of Jordan Hall and Rebel Wisdom

The River                                                                                                               

1951

Producer:                 Kenneth McEldowney, Jean Renoir
Director:                  Jean Renoir
Cinematographer:  Claude Renoir

Dune I: The Discontents of Modernity

'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.''

'When religion and politics ride the same cart when that cart is driven by a living holy man, nothing can stand in their path.'

I Introduction: The Discontents of Modernity

     I've been reading around Jung for several weeks now. He is endlessly fascinating. That mix of the intellectual, the spiritual and the artistic. One way of understanding the rise of Jordan Peterson is to see it as part of a larger Jungian revival. Perhaps Jungian thought is a way through the crisis of Liberalism, of Late and Post-Modernity, that is laid upon us.  It is certain that we have culturally, spiritually and possibly politically driven ourselves up a dead end.

     So discovering that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) had read Jung, as well as Nietzsche, I decided to re-read Dune (which I had first read in the early Eighties when the David Lynch film came out), and - as a long-term project - all the sequels Herbert wrote. From doing a little research into them things get pretty weird. Not that 'Dune' isn't pretty weird of itself. There are some rather strange things going on. I should add here that Science Fiction (and fantasy fiction) is something I don't normally read, perhaps, I have to admit, out of literary snobbery. It is certainly something that serious literary types look down upon. There are a small number of exceptions to this general rule: H G Wells, J G Ballard, George Orwell, for '1984' and Aldous Huxley for 'Brave New World' - but then who reads Huxley's early works now, and who, save the New Agers, the later quasi-mystical works such as 'Island' and 'The Doors of Perception'? I suspect Herbert may have read them, or at least been aware of them and of Huxley himself down the coast in Southern California and a user of mescaline. Both men had various degrees of interest in Vedanta. One feels that Huxley's influence is close in this book, perhaps most obviously in the similarities between the Seitch Tau Orgy and the 'Solidarity Service' in 'Brave New World'.

      (I feel the influence of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neuman (1905-1960) is close at hand too, especially his book 'The Great Mother - An Analysis of the Archetype' of 1955, but more of that later. I would also add, 19.10.22, the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin, but I'm not sure how Herbert would have come across Corbin's work as only two of Corbin's books had been published before 1965 when Dune was published, and only one of those in English. Were Corbin's ideas already in circulation in certain proto-New Age Groups on the American West Coast?)

     Dune, then, is an exception to the rule, and I have to admit I find it fascinating. Compelling, even. Perhaps not for the quality of the writing as such (it hasn't changed my opinion about the literary quality of sci-fi to be honest) but for the ideas and imaginative vision. It is the use of Jungian ideas, archetypes and so on, that gives this story its heft, its continuing resonance. Their presence, via Campbell, helps explain why the first Star Wars film succeeded and their absence why the subsequent films waxed in failure until they reached the bathetic 'Rise of Skywalker'.

     The Lord of the Rings, which is without doubt better written, falls into that same category; and having said that I've been struck with a number of similarities between the two works. Not an obvious parallel perhaps, though both authors could be described as conservatives, though of somewhat different stripes - Herbert being a sort of Thoreau-esque frontiersman, doughty and independent. Be that as it may, both books are an attempt to address, and come to terms with, through the use of mythological metaphor, the gargantuan horrors of the twentieth century, depicting societies that are poised at the point of monumental change - a change that is only achieved by the shedding of blood in war, and in the case of the Dune sequence much blood. Untold amounts. In both books the main character undergoes a series of trials and initiations that lead to an altered (higher) consciousness. Being burdened with a power beyond their comprehension, (and that of their companions and the wider society around them), and that makes living in the real, mundane world ultimately unbearable, they are compelled in that process of change to make a bitter renunciation, rather like the knights in the Grail legends. Perhaps you can see the Ring in the LOTR as an inversion of the Grail. Another link between both books is the almost inordinate length of vision; thousands of years are traversed in which the events described are set against a vast panoramic view of history. Both books explore ideas of destiny, fate and agency. Tolkein, Herbert, and Huxley for that matter, were all concerned with where Modernity has gone wrong and in particular with the disenchanting of the world, and its effect on the individual, society and environment as humanity waxes in alienation. 'Dune' however contains themes such as religious and political fanaticism, terrorism and the rise of dictatorship that are alien to Middle Earth. It is a novel, too, saturated with the emerging drugs culture of the 1960s. 

     A novel about the opening of the 'Doors of Perception'. A rich, complex and multi-layered work then, of almost infinite interest, that reflects not only Herbert's wide field of reading but also his autodidactism - for good and ill.