St Nicholas, Swansea

     Down to the old docks and the rather charming little church dedicated to St Nicholas, the patron saint of travelers. I walked from the station down High St, Castle Square and Wynd St., before crossing a dual carriageway - the noisome A4067 - to what was once the political and mercantile hub of the city. It is now a backwater.  Wynd St is about the most architecturally interesting street left in the city. It was once the commercial hub of city with any number of banks. It is now the hub of the city's 'night-time economy' and it is looking very down at heal. One building in particular looking ready to shed quantities of cornice down onto the street below. 

     The church was built in 1868 as part of the mission to seamen. The architect was Benjamin Bucknall (1833-95), the architect of the extraordinary, but unfinished, Woodchester Park.  He was also architect of Swansea Grammar School.  It was Benjamin's nephew William who was business partner of Sir John Ninian Comper qv.  St Nicholas's is a simple bi-cameral church in the Neo-Norman style, and I rather like it. Partly because it is so unexpected, like a little village church fell asleep one day, woke up and found itself by a vast, often ugly, city. It is now the 'Mission Gallery'.  The apse, as is fitting, is the best bit.

     The church stands at the end s end of Gloucester Place; on the west side of the street is rather fine but austere terrace. They look as though they've popped over from Ireland. These few streets between the docks and the A4067 (what is now called the Maritime Quarter) are really the only area of the city where any real numbers of Georgian houses are left - though are suspect one or two more are to be found lurking behind later facades on the High St.

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 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 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.”

 

Clyne Chapel I

      A little trip out today across the Infernal City to Clyne Chapel and two cancelled buses. The poor woman standing in front of me at the bus stop had had to wait 40 minutes for a bus to finally arrive. Disappointment continued for the chapel itself was locked. 
     The chapel is quite an eccentric little building. It sits all tucked away on what was once the Clyne Castle estate. The castle is now part of the university and the gardens are owned and managed by the city council.  The castle, originally Woodlands Castle and which dates in part to the late 18th century, was added to the portfolio of Vivian buildings in 1860 by William Graham Vivian, 2nd son of John Henry Vivian the industrialist and MP. The Vivians, who were originally from Cornwall, were among the richest of the city's copper magnates.

     W G appears to have fancied himself as a bit of an architect and has been suggested as architect of the chapel, which built in 1907 in a rather mid-Victorian Gothic Revival affair but somewhat spiced up with somewhat willful, if not in places, strange detailing, such as the oversized cresting on the exterior of the chancel.  Some parts of it are better than others, and there is a general heaviness to the design that reminds me of the church architecture of Late Medieval Scotland.  The only interior space I could access was the porch - in one respect pretty conventional except for the details of the capitals flanking the inner door and the eccentric presence of two slightly hermaphrodite looking herms guarding the outer door.  Where are they from, I wonder.  And what is their date? The eccentricity apart what is noticeable throughout is the quality of the workmanship. The Buildings of Wales volume on Glamorgan says that the church was intended to be both parish church and Vivian burial place. To supercede the Vivian Chapel at St Paul, Sketty?