A magazine for riba friends issue 1

Amagazine October 2014 • Issue 1 • £3.50

For RIBA Friends of Architecture

Edwin Smith in Italy

The photographer’s images reflect his fascination with the country, as Valeria Carullo discovers

66 at 80

Margaret Richardson marks 80 years of the RIBA building in Portland Place

Going Solo

A celebration of the one-artist museum by Adrian Dannatt

Beetles+Huxley Gallery

www.beetlesandhuxley.com

Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire, 1959

Edwin Smith

(1912-1971)

Beetles+Huxley Gallery partners with the RIBA to offer exquisitely made, limited edition prints of Edwin Smith’s photographs.

The gallery hosted a major retrospective of Edwin Smith’s work in 2009. A fully illustrated catalogue is still available from the gallery for £10 (post free).

Newly Ploughed Field, Holkham, Norfolk, 1970

Chris Beetles Gallery William Walcot RBA RE (1874-1943) A large display of the works of this significant architect and artist is on display at the gallery, and an associated catalogue with biographical details is available from the gallery for £10 (post free).

The Hoover Building ,Perivale,West London. Architect: Wallis, Gilbert and Partners

Chris Beetles Gallery: 8 & 10 Ryder St St James’s London SW1Y 6QB 020 7839 7551, gallery@chrisbeetles.com

RSA Galleries, Princes Street, Edinburgh

www.crittall-windows.com

Beetles+Huxley: 3-5 Swallow St, London, W1B 4DE 020 7434 4319, gallery@beetlesandhuxley.com

www.chrisbeetles.com

Cover House in Urbino (detail), 1963, by Edwin Smith. © Edwin Smith/ RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Contents

Left The 334 steps leading to the belfry of Big Ben. Photograph

by Peter Dazeley, from Unseen London (Francis Lincoln, 2014) by Mark Daly and Peter Dazeley (see page 56).

05 Welcome from Stephen R. Hodder

36 Going Solo

06 Contributors 08 The Building I Wish I Had Designed

42 What Makes an Award-Winning

MBE, President, RIBA

The Peckham Health Centre has been a source of inspiration for Patty Hopkins

11 Events and Exhibitions

Highlights of the season’s most interesting shows and activities.

16 Edwin Smith in Italy

The remarkable body of work produced by the photographer during his travels through Italy is examined by Valeria Carullo

22 Town, Country or Something in Between?

The enduring British romantic desire for a home with a garden takes many forms, as Philippa Lewis discovers

28 66 at 80

Margaret Richardson offers a timely appreciation of 66 Portland Place, which is 80 this year

34 Other Buildings at 80

The diverse architectural styles of the 1930s are reflected in Catherine Croft’s selection of three very different buildings around London 2

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Adrian Dannatt considers the Musée Soulages, Rodez, and the concept of the one-artist museum

Building?

The challenges faced by the panel judging the RIBA Stirling Prize, by Peter Clegg, former Chairman of the RIBA Awards group

46 From the Collections

The wealth of images of Big Ben in the RIBA Collections is explored by Kent Rawlinson

50 5 Best ... Contemporary Gardens Christopher Woodward picks his top 5 gardens designed by architects

55 Books

Peter Parker selects his personal favourites from the recently published titles on architecture

58 RIBA Friends of Architecture News, offers and events

64 Look Up

All Saints Margaret Street

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

3

Welcome

RIBA Friends of Architecture 66 Portland Place London W1B 1AD UK Registered charity no.210566 Tel: +44 (0)20 7307 3810 Email: friends@riba.org architecture.com/friends

Editorial A Magazine friends@riba.org Publishers: Jane Grylls

Kim Jenner Editor: Mary Scott Researcher and contributor: Tyro Heath Advertising: Paolo Russo: +44 (0)20 7300 5751

Jane Grylls/ Kim Jenner:

+44 (0)20 7300 5661

Catherine Cartwright:

+44 (0)20 7300 5658 Photography: RIBA Collections

(unless stated otherwise) Design: Tina Hall Repro/Printing: Tradewinds London Editorial Committee Lottie Cole Peter Parker Elena Smith

Celebrate 75 years of iconic design, from pioneering modernist vision to bold contemporary designs for home and office. Always timeless. Always true. www.knolleurope.com Knoll International – 91 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7EX – T 020 7236 6655

1929 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Architect and Furniture Designer 2014 Barcelona ® Collection

A Magazine is published twice a year by RA Enterprises. The contents of this magazine are copyright. Reproduction in part or in full is forbidden without permission of the editor.

The opinions expressed by writers of signed articles (even with pseudonyms) and letters appearing in the magazine are those of their respective authors; the RIBA, RA Enterprises and A Magazine are not responsible for these opinions or statements. The editor will give careful consideration to material submitted – articles, photographs, drawings and so on – but does not undertake responsibility for damage or their safe return.

Welcome to the first issue of A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture.

I am delighted that we can now offer you, our generous supporters, a biannual publication through which you can discover more about the RIBA, our collections, and the subjects of architecture and design.

Since our foundation in 1834, we have built an unrivalled collection of over four million architectural objects. In this – and future – issues of A Magazine, we will draw on these collections to tell stories about the past, present and future of our built world. With contributions from eminent architects, architectural historians, writers and commentators, we will explore the ways in which architecture shapes our lives and our communities.

Each issue will also feature the latest news and updates for RIBA Friends and supporters – from exhibition news and event highlights to special offers and much more.

It is an exciting time to become a RIBA Friend of Architecture. With the opening of our first museum-quality Architecture Gallery earlier this year – a space that has transformed the way we showcase our collections – and the continuing development of a lively programme of exhibitions, events and learning activities, there’s much to see and discover.

As a charity, we rely on the support of you, our Friends, and our members and sponsors, to continue this work. Thank you for your generosity.

In this, our first issue, we celebrate the eightieth anniversary of our current headquarters, 66 Portland Place – the home of architecture in the UK – with a fascinating feature by Margaret Richardson. I hope you will enjoy visiting the building and seeing for yourself the materials and astonishing craftsmanship Margaret describes.

In her feature, Patty Hopkins answers a question so many architects have surely asked themselves: which building do you wish you had designed? Her reflections on the transformative power of the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London, remind us of the significance of the ‘Peckham Experiment’.

I am sure many readers will have followed this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize announcements. For an insight into what makes an award-winning building, I encourage you to read our interview with Peter Clegg, former Chairman of the RIBA Awards Group.

I hope you enjoy reading these and the many other articles featured in A Magazine. Please do let us know your thoughts by emailing friends@riba.org – we welcome your feedback and ideas.

Stephen R. Hodder MBE President, RIBA A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

5

Contributors

6

Peter Clegg

After completing a Master’s Degree in Architecture in Italy, Valeria Carullo moved to London to work at the RIBA Photographs Collection and to study photography. She assisted the photographer Richard Bryant before returning to RIBA as co-curator of the Photographs Collection. Valeria has given numerous talks on architectural and photographic subjects, co-curated the exhibition Framing Modernism and, more recently, the current RIBA exhibition Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith.

Peter Clegg is a Founding Partner with Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Regarded as a key pioneer in environmental design, he has more than 30 years’ experience in low-energy architecture and is actively involved in research, design and education. He has led projects at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, London’s South Bank Centre and the Brighton Dome. He was Chairman of the RIBA Awards Group until July 2014, holds a professorship at Bath University, and in 2009 was made a Royal Designer for Industry.

Adrian Dannatt

Catherine Croft Catherine Croft is Director of the C20 Society, which campaigns for the preservation of buildings from 1914 onwards. She is the author of Concrete Architecture (2004), and teaches a course in the Conservation of Historic Concrete. She started out studying architecture, before becoming more interested in history and preservation, and now lectures extensively and writes for a wide range of publications.

Adrian Dannatt is the author of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2002) and a contributor to numerous architecture and design publications, including This is What we Do: A Muf Manual (2001). He has curated exhibitions at various locations, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower in Oklahoma and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and was a collaborator on the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2010.

Patty Hopkins

Philippa Lewis

Patty Hopkins studied at the Architectural Association. She is joint Founding Partner of Hopkins Architects Partnership LLP, which she co-founded with her husband, Sir Michael Hopkins, in 1976. They were jointly awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1994.

Philippa Lewis has worked as a picture editor, photographer and writer.

Until recently she ran the Edifice Architectural Photo Library. Her books include Dictionary of Ornament (with Gillian Darley, 1986); Details: A Guide to House Design in Britain (2003); Everything You Can Do in the Garden Without Actually Gardening (2009); and Everyman’s Castle: The Story of Our Cottages, Country Houses, Terraces, Flats, Semis and Bungalows (2014).

Peter Parker

Kent Rawlinson

Margaret Richardson

Peter Parker is the author of two books about the First World War, The Old Lie (1987) and The Last Veteran (2009), and biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood. He is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and writes for the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the TLS and Hortus. He is currently writing a book about A.E. Housman and Englishness.

Kent Rawlinson is the Head of Collections of the British Architectural Library. His 20 years’ experience includes working as an archaeologist, archivist and researcher, as well as a decade as the Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace. He is currently writing a book on Henry VIII and early Tudor architecture. More generally, Kent is concerned with promoting both public and academic interest in architectural culture.

Margaret Richardson’s career began at the RIBA Drawings Collection where she was the Assistant Curator from 1963 to 1985. She moved to Sir John Soane’s Museum in 1985, first as its Assistant Curator and then as Director in 1995. She retired in 2005 and is now the Honorary Curator of Architecture at the Royal Academy. She is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

American Wild: It can kill you, or exhilarate you.

It’s always there, a character in the great unfolding narrative of American writing. The summer issue of Granta is dedicated to stories of the wild.

Christopher Woodward Christopher Woodward is Director of the Garden Museum, which was remodelled by Dow Jones Architects as a gallery space in 2008. He was previously Director of the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, which commissioned a radical extension from Eric Parry. His book In Ruins (2001) explores the fusion between architecture and Nature. He has recently swum the Thames from Oxford to London, raising £55,000 towards the Garden Museum’s next stage of development.

subscribe to Granta, the magazine of new writing, for just £32 and receive Granta 128: American Wild as a gift. ©Aaron Huey

Valeria Carullo

visit www.granta.com/wilder or call 0500 004 033 and quote ‘wild’.

The south façade, viewed from the street.

Photograph by Dell and Wainwright, 1934. © Dell and Wainwright/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

The building I wish I had designed Patty Hopkins, co-founder of Hopkins Architects, is asked to pick a building she admires and would like to have designed herself Why did the Peckham Health Centre immediately spring to mind when I considered this question? I hadn’t thought about the building for years, but now realise that its story reflects many influences in my own life.

I was the daughter of two doctors. My father was an orthopaedic surgeon and my mother a general practitioner. Nineteenth-century hospitals were part of my young life, and I remember visits at Christmas, watching my father carve the turkey and helping to distribute presents to the young patients, and Matron’s tea parties.

My thesis project as a student at the Architectural Association was to design a 8

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Community Care Unit, effectively a group practice, housing teams of doctors with support staff. The practice would carry out minor procedures and thus relieve the burden on hospitals, and the unit was intended to be more convenient for patients. This kind of approach to medical practice was a new concept at the time that greatly appealed to me.

After the AA, I worked for the King’s Fund, the health charity that shapes health and socialcare policy, organising an exhibition, The Role of the Health Centre. This was when I first came across the Peckham Experiment, a concept of the ‘cultivation of health rather than the

The swimming pool, Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham, designed by Owen Williams, 1935.

Activity in the swimming pool, at the heart of the building, can be viewed from all sides.

Photograph by Dell and Wainwright, 1934. © Dell and Wainwright/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

treatment of illness’. It was the brainchild of two local doctors, George Scott Williamson and his wife Innes Pearse, in the 1930s. They needed a building in which to explore their theories, the design of which would be crucial to the success of the experiment, and chose Owen Williams to design it. Williams was one of the first architects to grasp how new engineering techniques could complement the architectural aims of the Modern movement. This innovatory response resonated with my experience as a student at the AA in the early 1960s, where we were firmly convinced that our architectural designs would deliver a brave new world of social reform.

The Pioneer Health Centre, usually known as the Peckham Health Centre, was completed in 1935, and is a building of great openness, glazed externally and internally, and full of light and air. At its core is the swimming pool, whose ripples of water cast reflections on the walls and ceiling of the main gathering spaces and cafeteria that originally overlooked it. There was a gym, theatre, and children’s clinic and nursery, as well as doctors’ surgeries on the top floor.

The interior was simple; Williams apparently regarded some of his peers as ‘decoration merchants’. The exterior has a calm, repetitive grandeur, with undulating bay windows on the south side.

The Centre was an immediate success, and a total of 950 families joined, paying a shilling a week. It was at the heart of Peckham’s social life and ran for four years until the outbreak of the Second World War. It reopened in 1945, but when the National Health Service was launched in 1948 the Centre wasn’t incorporated into the system, which was focused more on curing disease than promoting health. As a result it began to decline.

I visited the building in the 1970s and enjoyed talking to Innes Pearse, by then an elderly lady. The building was run-down, but it was still possible to sense the atmosphere of aspiration and optimism it must have had in its heyday. When Walter Gropius was living in England as a refugee in 1937, he said the Centre was the best new building he had seen in London, and the only one he found interesting.

It has since been converted into private flats, but the swimming pool survives as a reminder of its past.

In the main social room on the first floor, the undulating window bays on the south façade overlook the garden.

Photograph by Dell and Wainwright. 1934. © Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

9

News and Events

Sustainable Eco Homes On water On land Sitting lightly Ask for ideas

Events and Exhibitions The pick of this season’s shows and other things to do in the UK and abroad

020 8123 8962

ecofloatinghomes.com

Architecture on Film Barbican Centre, London Throughout the autumn architecturefoundation.org.uk The Architecture Foundation is presenting a series of one-off screenings this season, exploring how architecture and the city are represented and discussed across cinema, documentary and art.

Highlights include The World and the short film Dallas Southfork in Hermes Land on 19 November, and One Way Boogie Woogie and 27 Years Later on 10 December.

Low impact living Ecofloat_Aut14.indd 1

07/10/2014 12:32

a journey through 20th and 21st century architecture by eighteen exceptional international photographers barbican.org.uk

Image credit: Iwan Baan, Torre David, 2011 © Iwan Baan. Courtesy of the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles.

10

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Above Clock turret, No.1 Poultry, City of London, 1997, by James Stirling and Michael Wilford.

Photograph © Sarah J. Duncan.

From 100 Buildings, 100 Years, Royal Academy.

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age

relationship which these architects have found between making art and their own architectural practice.

Barbican Art Gallery, London Until 11 January 2015

100 Buildings, 100 Years: Views of British Architecture since 1914

The Barbican brings together 18 photographers from the 1930s to the present day who have changed the way we view architecture and perceive the world around us. From the first skyscrapers in New York to the modern towers of Venezuela, this show reveals the transformative power of societies throughout the world.

Architects as Artists

Architecture Space Royal Academy of Arts, London Until 1 February 2015 Ranging from grand architectural icons to structures from the war years, this exhibition illuminates the extraordinary and often unexpected variety of the last hundred years of British architecture.

Room 128a, Architecture Gallery Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15 November 2014 – 29 March 2015

The Anatomy of a Building

This show explores how architects use drawing not only as an illustrative tool, but for its own potential as an imaginative art form. Filled with colour and life, it examines the ongoing reciprocal

This unique exhibition marks the centenary of the birth of the visionary architect Sir Denys Lasdun, and 50 years since he created the radical new headquarters for the Royal College of

Royal College of Physicians, London Until 13 February 2015

Right Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic), Chongqing Municipality, 2006, by Nadav Kander. © Nadav Kander, courtesy Flowers Gallery. From Constructing Worlds, Barbican Art Gallery.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

11

News and Events

Events and Exhibitions From far left The façade of the Beaumont Hotel, Mayfair, showing Anthony Gormley’s ‘Room’. Photograph © Stephen White, London.

Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design

Short Courses at The Cass Audio Digital Design Dress Making Fashion and Textiles Finishing Furnishing Furniture Making Graphic Design Illustration Interior Design Jewellery and Silversmithing

Musical Instrument Making Photography Portfolio Preparation Printmaking Product Design Restoration and Conservation RIBA CPD Courses Software Theory and Practice Urban Design Upholstery

The Cass, London Metropolitan University is situated on the East London City fringe, a vibrant area recognised as a centre of excellence for art, architecture and design.

www.thecass.com/short-courses

Gardens and War 24/09/14 - 05/01/15

Abram Games in his North London studio. © Estate of Abram Games. From Designing the 20th Century, Jewish Museum.

Physicians in Regent’s Park. On display are rarely seen original models of Lasdun’s best-known buildings (including the National Theatre and Keeling House) alongside drawings, letters and photographs from private collections and the Lasdun Archive at the RIBA.

his birth, this exhibition will explore his immigrant roots, his Jewish background and his enormous contribution to British design.

Designing the 20th Century: Life and Work of Abram Games

Photographers’ Gallery, London 31 October 2014 – 18 January 2015

Jewish Museum, London Until 4 January 2015 gardenmuseum.org.uk

Abram Games was one of the most important and influential figures of twentieth-century graphic design.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of

Edward Steichen, In High Fashion: The Condé Nast Years 1923–1937 Edward Steichen was the chief photographer on Condé Nast’s two most prestigious publications, Vogue and Vanity Fair, in the 1920s and 1930s.

This exhibition offers a rare insight into his distinctive approach towards portraiture and fashion photography. His work features contemporary designs by

Chanel, Lanvin and Schiaparelli, as well as portraits of Greta Garbo, W.B. Yeats and Fred Astaire.

Anthony Gormley’s ‘Room’ Beaumont Hotel, Mayfair, London thebeaumont.com A one-of-a-kind hotel experience can be found at the new Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair. Guests can cocoon themselves in sculptor Anthony Gormley’s ‘Room’, a suite housed within a giant anthropomorphic structure, made up of vast rectangular blocks. The crouched figure of steel and fumed oak sits on top of a flat roof on the building’s façade.

Royal Mail’s New Stamp Collection The Royal Mail has launched 10 new stamps that celebrate the variety and originality of UK seaside architecture.

The selection features distinctive types of buildings from the Victorian era to the present day. Six stamps depict specially photographed images of the Eastbourne Bandstand, Tinside Lido, Bangor Pier, Southwold lighthouse, Blackpool Pleasure Beach and a Bexhill on Sea shelter, and a miniature sheet of four stamps pays tribute to the piers of Llandudno, Dunoon, Brighton and Worthing.

12

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Royal Mail’s collecton of six stamps celebrating UK seaside architecture. © Royal Mail Group Ltd.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

13

News and Events

MODERN BRITISH AND IRISH ART

17 and 18 November 2014 New Bond Street, London

ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7468 8295 matthew.bradbury@bonhams.com

Events and Exhibitions Desire Lines: Romance and Rationalism in Bridge Design Architecture Centre, Bristol Until 16 November 2014 Using the anniversary of the Clifton Suspension Bridge to explore the creation of some of today’s most innovative contemporary bridges, this exhibition includes audio-visual interviews with engineers, photographs, drawings and models, as well as interactive family activities. Part of the Bridge150 Festival.

Magnum Photos: One Archive, Three Views De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex Until 4 January 2015 This is the first time the resin-print archive of the photography agency Magnum has formed the basis of a curated show. The curators have chosen 130 rarely seen works by photographers

Zac du Cocteau housing complex, 2014,

by ECDM Architects.

Photograph by Benoît Fougeirol.

including Abbas, Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt and Martin Parr. Collectively the selection presents a series of fascinating snapshots in time, an imperfect and personal history, of the period from 1940 to 2000.

Extraordinary Modern Holiday Houses to Rent from Living Architecture living-architecture.co.uk

The company Living Architecture was set up in 2009 to encourage appreciation of modern architecture and to revolutionise UK holiday rentals. The bejewelled A House for Essex – by architectural practice FAT, in collaboration with ceramicist Grayson Perry – immediately captured the curiosity and attention of the public. This and other dwellings will be available to rent in 2015, along with a new addition, John Pawson’s Life House/Tŷ Bywyd, which will provide an isolated retreat and space for contemplation in the remote Welsh hills.

RIBA Liverpool City Tours Throughout the year, times vary depending on tour/theme Join a knowledgeable RIBA guide for one of our fascinating walking tours. Explore key buildings and public spaces to discover more about Liverpool’s architectural past, present and future.

RIBA Liverpool City Tours offer three regular tours throughout the year, ‘Gateway to the World’, ‘City of Culture, Learning and Faiths’ and ‘Sculpture, Culture & Civic Pride’. Please check architecture. com/RIBA (search ‘North West office’) for information, including timings and how to book.

New Architectural Project in Suburban Paris The architects ECDM have recently completed the ZAC du Coteau housing complex in the Parisian suburb of Arcueil, south of Paris, which is well worth a detour if you’re planning a trip to the city. Comprised of two separate buildings, the design features undulating balconies that provide generous outdoor space for residents.

DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903-1975) Cantate Domino bronze with a green patina 209.8 cm. (81 1/2 in.) high £500,000 - 700,000

Part of the Quarto Group

bonhams.com/modernbritish

14

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

15

Edwin Smith in Italy Edwin Smith is widely celebrated for his outstanding ability to capture a sense of place in his photographs of buildings and landscape, primarily in Britain. But he was also inspired by his frequent visits to Italy, where he was captivated by the spectacles of everyday life in the Baroque surroundings of its cities, and by the wild beauty of Sicily, as Valeria Carullo explains ‘Italy has long occupied a warm place in the hearts of those who dwell in northern lands less favoured by the sun and less rich in monuments and art treasures of past ages.’ These sentiments, expressed on the dust jacket of the book The Wonders of Italy (1965), were undoubtedly shared by both the photographer Edwin Smith and his second wife Olive Cook who supplied, respectively, the illustrations and text for the volume. It is one of four books on Italian art and architecture Smith worked on in the 1960s, by which time his reputation as one of Britain’s most accomplished photographers was well established.

Smith was born in Camden, London, in 1912.

As a teenager he explored his neighbourhood and immediate surroundings with his first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie. He later developed a passion for drawing and painting, although his ambition to make a living from these remained unfulfilled. After studying at

16

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

the Architectural Association and a period spent working in architects’ practices, from the mid-1930s Smith turned to photography as his main occupation. His subjects at this time were extremely varied, ranging from fashion to advertising, architecture to ballet, social documentary to studies of plants and trees.

Several photographs from this period already reveal some of the outstanding qualities of his later work, including an acute power of observation, a strong sense of composition, an eye for the significant detail and an interest in what he called ‘warm humanity’.

In the early 1940s he met author and artist Olive Cook, whom he married in 1954. They were bound by both spiritual and intellectual affinities and created a formidable professional partnership which lasted until Smith’s death in 1971. Cook, who was a talented and evocative writer, often supplied the text that accompanied Smith’s published photographs when, in the 1950s, he began to receive commissions from the publishing company Thames and Hudson to illustrate books on British architecture and topography. This work encouraged him to focus his camera on a more restricted range of subjects and to develop what was to become the trademark characteristics of his photography: a highly sensitive response to the sense of place and an ability to capture it in his images.

His photographs also reveal a profound attraction for small-scale, intimate, unassuming subjects. As much as he enjoyed photographing the great British cathedrals, Smith declared: ‘For me photography in a good village church is unalloyed bliss.’ This is clearly demonstrated by the inspired images he took for his first book,

Left Edwin Smith and Olive Cook in Sicily, 1954. All images © Edwin Smith/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Opposite Village women in Siculiana, Sicily, 1954.

Funeral car, Agrigento, Sicily, 1950s.

Some of Smith’s images of Sicily reflect his fascination with the unusual and the bizarre, which might have partly been inspired by the French photographer Eugène Atget

18

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

English Parish Churches, published by Thames and Hudson in 1952.

In the early 1950s Smith visited Italy for the first time, travelling to Sicily with Cook to enter a painting competition open to non-resident artists. They were soon seduced by the wild beauty of the island and ended up staying for several months, returning in 1954 to explore areas they had not yet visited. During this second trip Smith took many memorable images, while Cook remarked: ‘as opposed to the world that seems to be sinking ever more rapidly into a uniform greyness and mediocrity … [Sicily] impresses one above all with its vivid variety. It

is a country that abounds … in sharp, bracing contrasts, emotional, aesthetic, intellectual, physical; it is a country of individuals, of peaks and valleys, where not even extreme poverty can suppress a captivating zest for life.’ The island’s ‘vivid variety’ is skilfully captured in Smith’s photographs, from the exuberance of the Baroque buildings of the city of Noto and the majesty of the Greek temples in Agrigento on the southern coast, to the humble but charming character of countryside dwellings.

Some of these images also reflect Smith’s fascination with the unusual and the bizarre, which might have partly been inspired by the French photographer Eugène Atget, the only influence on his camera-work acknowledged

by Smith. Atget photographed Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, focusing his attention on minor architectural details, forgotten corners of the city and disappearing ways of life. He was drawn to unconventional, whimsical, slightly surreal subjects, such as traditional French funerary vehicles. Smith echoed this type of imagery in his photographs of Sicilian hearses, as well as his details of the extravagant Baroque decoration of Sicilian town-houses. Describing the façade of one of these houses, Palazzo Villadorata in Noto, Cook remarks: ‘this unassuming composition is merely the background for the most outrageously fantastic sculptural ornament imaginable.’ The exuberance and drama of the Baroque was a constant draw for Smith and Cook. In her introduction to The Wonders of Italy, Cook observes: ‘this art … permeates the whole spectacle of everyday life in Italy. The very fact that we tend to look upon it as a spectacle is in itself revealing.’ The book includes some of the most stunning images of Sicily taken by Smith.

However, despite his enthusiasm for the subject, the project of a book on this region never materialised.

The Sicilian images also show an early hint of Smith’s ability to respond to and interpret foreign cultures with a sensitivity not dissimilar to that he showed for British subjects. This skill appears even more remarkable if we consider that Smith was not keen on travelling. He nevertheless did so extensively in the 1960s due to a growing number of commissions to illustrate books on European art and architecture. The first text on an Italian subject was Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Glory and the Grief (1960), written by Marcel Brion. Smith was initially disappointed by Pompeii, where he found too many tourists and ‘too little mystery’.

However, after a few visits in the early morning and late evening, he began to feel ‘moved by

the place’ and eventually produced a series of images, which Brion appropriately described as ‘brilliantly evocative’. Critics and public alike agreed with Brion’s enthusiastic response: Pompeii and Herculaneum was one of Smith’s most successful publications. The Times declared that ‘both for text and pictures, this is a splendid job’, while the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted Smith’s ability to convey ‘a remarkable, almost sensuous feeling for surfaces and textures’.

Two more books on Italy followed: Venice: The Mask of Italy (1962) and Rome: From its Foundation to the Present (1971). Both mainly

From top Petrified corpse in the tepidarium, Thermae di Stabiae, Pompeii, 1959.

Palazzo Villadorata, Noto, Sicily, 1954.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

19

From left Console on the third terrace of Villa Garzoni, Collodi, Tuscany, 1962.

Rowlock of a gondola, Venice, 1961.

feature Smith’s images of monuments and wellknown sites, but he also recorded glimpses of everyday life and details of seemingly humble subjects, such as the gondola rowlock photographed in Venice, which he described as ‘magnificent, functional yet fantastic’. Smith’s eye for telling detail, and his curiosity for the world around him enabled him to find beauty in unexpected places and to capture it with his camera, aided by his superb compositional skills. Venice, with its canals, narrow streets and small courts, offered him an endless succession of romantic, small-scale picturesque subjects, and in photographing them Smith followed a centuries-old tradition, as Cook pointed out: ‘It is more than a coincidence that generations of scene painters have drawn inspiration not only from the famous Italian piazzas but from the no less characteristic alleyway and court.’

None of these books, all published by Elek Books, did as much justice to Smith’s images as Thames and Hudson’s The Wonders of Italy. Reproduced in stunning photogravure, a printing process notable for its sensitivity to a full range of tones, the photographs were grouped between blocks of text with a generous number of full-page bleeds and double-page spreads. As a whole they represent a poignant visual interpretation of the assertion made by Cook in the introduction: ‘The fascinating and distinguishing feature of contrast in Italy is that while it is always arresting and sometimes even melodramatic, it always evokes a final sensation of harmony, both visually and emotionally.’

20

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Smith’s Italian images also feature in other books he was commissioned to illustrate in the 1960s, such as Great Interiors, Great Houses of Europe and Great Gardens. The last of these includes his images of the spectacular sixteenth-century Garden of Bomarzo, near Viterbo in central Italy, animated by fantastical stone creatures that surely must have appealed to Smith’s sense of the surreal. He also photographed the garden at Villa Garzoni in Tuscany for the same book. Its theatrical and romantic character is captured in the image of the satyr overlooking the terrace, a work featured on the cover of Evocations of Place (2007), the definitive book on the photographer written by the RIBA Photographs Collection’s late curator, Robert Elwall. It is revealing of the superb quality of Smith’s work in Italy that Elwall chose this image to represent the work of a photographer who is often seen as quintessentially British.

Romantic, picturesque, full of contrasts and individuality: this is how we see Italy through Edwin Smith’s eyes, not only in the images featured in these publications but also in the many unpublished ones that form part of his extensive archive, bequeathed by Cook to the RIBA in 2002. The Institute is now staging the first major retrospective on the photographer, Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith (to 6 December 2014), which primarily focuses on his work in the British Isles, but also includes some of the most striking images he photographed in Italy.

Opposite Street in the Spanish quarter, Naples, 1963.

Town, Country or Something in Between?

Hanover Square, Mayfair, from Thomas Malton’s A Picturesque Tour Through the Cities of London and Westminster (vol.2, 1792).

The home we live in says a great deal about our status in Britain, and our romantic ideal of a house in the country – whether a stately home or a cottage – is one that has persisted for centuries. Philippa Lewis suggests our national preference for a home with a patch of garden has dictated the style and popularity of all the major housing types, from bungalows and flats to suburban semi-detached villas and terraced town-houses

‘God made the country and man made the town,’ wrote the poet and fervent Christian William Cowper in the 1770s – a line that intimated the superiority of the first. Town, however, is where livings have usually been earned, and by 1851 over half of England’s population were urban. As Hermann Muthesius, German architect and diplomat, so acutely observed in Das englische Haus (1904), the English would forgo ‘theatre, concerts, dinnerparties, the races, at-homes and much else that goes by the name of pleasure for the sake of breathing simple fresh country air and enjoying their gardens and countryside’. Nostalgia for

rural roots and the industrialisation of towns and cities doubtless have parts to play in this historical bias.

In Britain status has always been reflected by the home we live in; it is noticeable that a consistent reaction to success has been to acquire a country house, as spacious and expensive as could be managed. Since the Elizabethan period this has been true of courtiers, naval commanders enriched with prize money, nabobs returned from India, politicians, brewers, bankers, slave traders and many more. Daniel Defoe noted in 1724 that considerable estates were being purchased by

Below, left Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, built for the Earl of Carlisle, architect Sir John Vanbrugh, illustrated in Colen Campbell’s Vitrivius Britannicus, vol.1 (1715). All images on pp.22–3, and p.24 top, © RIBA Library Books & Periodicals Collection.

Opposite, right Mansion at Didsbury, near Manchester, built for John Taylor, architect Thomas Worthington, illustrated in Building News, 29 August 1873 (and described as ‘a small estate of 20 acres’).

22

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

the citizens of London, including iron merchants and wholesale grocers, ‘who in another age will equal the families of the ancient gentry’ – yesterday’s equivalent of rock musicians and hedge funders. On the façade of your country house and the quality of your furnishings were you judged. Few, it seems, invested their wealth in a grand town-house. James Stuart commented in his Critical Observations on the Buildings and Improvements of London (1771) that he thought it peculiar that the aristocracy, ‘whose proud seat in the country is adorned with all the riches of architecture, porticoes, and columns’, in town inhabited just a terraced house ‘for all the world like a packer or sugar baker’. By the eighteenth century the ‘big house’ was no longer at the epicentre of the rural community, alongside the church and village housing, but remote and ‘emparked’, in its own mini-arcadia dotted with temples and lakes. Country-house visiting – by carefully self-selected groups spending days in busy leisure – was the way in which the upper class could consolidate their position, arranging marriages and horse-trading politics – well away from the shifting sands and prying eyes of town.

If we take the country house as the form of housing most people aspired to – in 1979, while Curator of the RIBA Drawings Collection, John Harris indexed 107 books of views of country seats published between 1715 and 1870 – it is easy to see the trickle-down effect. For those whose business was in the country, Georgian

elegance was pasted over the vernacular fronts of farm-houses, and rectories and vicarages were built in a classical style appropriate for mainstays of country society. In the late eighteenth century the gentry also took to the idea of the ‘cottage’. The cottage, often ornée, with thatch, diamond-pane windows, barge-boards and rustic verandah, bore little resemblance to a genuine labourer’s cottage, which at that date was generally a fairly grim hovel. It represented a romantic and picturesque view of country life: as Jane Austen’s character Willoughby asserted in Sense and Sensibility (1811), ‘The only form of housing in which happiness is attainable’.

Pattern books with titles such as Designs for Elegant Cottages and Small Villas Calculated for the Comfort and Convenience of Persons of Moderate and of Ample Fortune by E. Gyfford (1806) showed the way. The country cottage has ever since remained an object of desire for the British, even if only at weekends and not in November or February.

Two virtues were (and still are) regularly ascribed to country living; the first was health and the second was comfort. Epicurus’s dictum that a healthy body and tranquil soul were achieved by withdrawing into the garden resonated with the British. A treatise on fruitgrowing by William Lawson, a Yorkshire clergyman, published in 1618 extended into propaganda for rural living: he urged the ‘gods of the earth’ – lawyers, merchants and politicians A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

23

is Easton Grey in Gloucestershire: ‘convenient, comfortable, perfectly neat without the teizing precision of order – the library-drawing room furnished with good sense – delightful armchairs, low sofas, stools, plenty of moveable tables – books on tables and in open bookcases and in short all that speaks the habits and affords the means of agreeable occupation.’

What did living in the town or city offer in the way of housing? The terraced house has been the default urban form from the seventeenth century through to the twentieth.

Maybe the fact that terraced housing was always speculative is the reason why it never won such a firm place in the affections of its inhabitants.

Landowners leased plots to builders, who then had to finish the houses and sell the lease on as quickly as possible. Until the late eighteenth century the leases were for a mere 42 years, before being extended to 99. Although some speculator/builders, such as Thomas Cubitt in Belgravia, were notably successful, there was a degree of insecurity with constructing terraced housing: areas wavered in fashionability, builders went bankrupt and some scrimped on materials, wars affected the market. The Duke of Devonshire complained when he took a house in Brighton’s Royal Crescent in 1828 that ‘he

was surrounded by the shells and cases of the houses that compose Kemp Town’. The social reformer Charles Booth noted in the late 1880s that Paddington terraces had been built for a well-to-do class but that it was now ‘difficult to say why they have fallen so low’, and he reported the incidence of rooms let Box and Cox, an arrangement where one tenant occupied the room at night and another during the day.

One feature of terraced housing is that there is usually a narrow strip of back garden or yard.

No other nation has built this housing type in such quantity; is it because just a little bit of garden is better than nothing? Muthesius saw in terraced housing that people are ‘nearer to the soil … they cultivate their gardens and, best of all, know that they are masters in their own houses’. In the nineteenth century the choice of whether to live in the town or country, had widened to include urban flats and suburbia.

Muthesius believed that for the English ‘flat dwelling can only be regarded as an emergency substitute for living in a private house’. Flats lifted people away from the ground and their own front door. In the mid-nineteenth century housing reformers such as George Peabody had begun to improve on the Dickensian conditions of the urban working classes by building blocks

Puckaster Cottage, near Niton, Isle of Wight, illustration from Robert Lugar’s Villa Architecture (1828).

A genuine worker’s cottage near Worcester, etching by Frances Stevens, published in Views of Cottages and Farmhouses in England and Wales (1815).

– to abandon the city ‘choaken (as it were) with the close aire of sumptuous Buildings, their stomachs cloyed with a variety of Banquets’ and go and sit in their orchards. This message is still being hammered over two hundred years later in an 1856 brochure for new houses on the Woodriding’s Estate in still rural Pinner (where the newly married Samuel and Isabella Beeton settled in Chandos Villas at a rent of £50 per annum): ‘Having shown that the love of a country residence is a universal passion as it were … it is unnecessary to go into the reasons why the pleasures of country life compensate for the anxieties of a town profession.’ This was a reasonable argument, since only two years previously the physician John Snow had 24

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

discovered that contaminated water was the cause of cholera, and city milk was known to be frequently adulterated.

Comfort was something that the British claimed was their forte – Robert Southey in Letters from England (1808) stated that the words ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ were specifically English and untranslatable: ‘Home is the one by which the Englishman means his house … the other word is comfort; it means all the enjoyments and privileges of home.’ Of course home and comfort could be urban, but Southey’s contemporary, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, gives an explicit description of the perfect ‘comfortable’ country house in a letter to her half-sister Honora in the 1820s. The house

Harewood House, Hanover Square, architect Paul Hoffmann.

The building comprised flats with shops below.

Illustration from Flats, Urban Houses and Cottage Homes, edited

by W. Shaw Sparrow (1906).

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

25

Left Dust jacket of Richard Reiss’s The Home I Want (1918).

Left Cover of Ideal Home, May 1936, illustrating both vernacular and modern styles in a setting of unspoilt countryside.

Image courtesy of Philippa Lewis.

of model flats. These appeared shockingly large and were derided in some quarters as ‘barracks’.

However in increasingly crowded cities it had become clear that flats were a sensible solution for all classes. Although the Scots had long lived in them, they were regarded by the English as highly suspect and ‘foreign’. Discussion on building flats at the RIBA in 1877 ended with the President, Sir Charles Barry, declaring that ‘it would be difficult for the generality of Englishmen to imagine anything more miserable or uncomfortable’. The lack of stairs led to a worry about the proximity of servants, and even the ease of housekeeping a flat was seen as a dangerous excuse for women to shirk their wifely duties. The Continental bias continued well into the 1930s when the writer John Gloag complained about Le Corbusier’s influence and the lack of comfort for people who ‘have possessions, books, furniture and prejudices that would clash rather badly with the mechanistic functionality of the “machine to live in” flat’.

Suburbs grew alongside developments in transport, as railways, horse buses, trams and tubes reaching out in ever-greater circles around cities. Although despised by both country folk and urbanites, for many the suburb has offered the best of both worlds, town and country. J.C. Loudon described a suburb as a place where 26

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

your land was for leisure not production. He recommended the ‘double detached’ (i.e. semi) in his book The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion as early as 1838, reasoning that in the suburbs everyone was comfortably of the same class, in contrast to the country where ‘either you have a display of hospitality, wealth and magnificence or have a life of labour’. Prime Minister David Lloyd George promised ‘homes fit for heroes’ at the end of the First World War, and on the cover of Richard Reiss’s book The Home I Want (1918), the returning soldier points to the sunny suburban semi-detached, not the smoky terrace. Ownership of just such houses boomed between the wars, made possible by the fall of prices and drop in interest rates, and the suburbs spread, as George Orwell put it, ‘like gravy over a table cloth’. Developers competed to emphasise the ‘Healthful’ nature of their estates as well as qualities such as ‘Artistry and Utility Combined’ or the fact that they were ‘Facing Glorious Woods and Open Heath’. This was sufficient countryside for millions.

The persistent desire to get away from city life was, ironically, the genesis of the housing type that became the scourge of those trying to protect the countryside. Bungalows, single storey and with verandahs for outdoor sitting or even sleeping were, in the 1880s and 1890s, a fresh

type of housing and it was their healthfulness that was stressed. They offered ‘invigorating tranquillity’, as one enthusiast put it, or in the words of R.A. Briggs (1891), one of the few architects ever to embrace the form, ‘a free and easy dwelling in the country, erected on sites out of the way of the ordinary run of holidayseekers, or on some river bank or unfrequented shore’. It was when holiday retreats became permanent homes that the backlash began.

Notorious was Peacehaven, a hitherto empty Sussex cliff-top that became in the 1920s the site of grid roads spattered with bungalows due to the energies of a publicity-seeking developer, Charles Neville. Clough Williams-Ellis regarded bungalows as ‘England’s most disfiguring disease’, and their proliferation was one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in

1926. There is little doubt though that the many ad hoc bungalows built on cheap agricultural land during this period (many self-built, some converted from sheds or railway carriages) gave their working-class creators fresh air and freedom on weekends and holidays; respite from the congested city.

The regeneration of cities, price of housing, cost of travel, and changing working practices are all factors which today determine whether people live in the town or the country. The growth of second homes is testament to the fact that many try for both, but a statement in 2012 by Nick Boles, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Planning, that it was everyone’s moral right ‘to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’, seems to suggest that national preferences change little.

Design by R.A. Briggs from Bungalows and Country Residences (1891), one of several he built on land that he named Bellagio, near East Grinstead, West Sussex.

Plan for ‘Anthelen’, built in the 1930s at Dunton in Essex by the Anthony family from Whitehorse Lane off the Mile End Road; they moved there permanently after their East End house was blitzed in 1940.

By courtesy of Michael Anthony.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

27

66 at 80 66 Portland Place, the headquarters of the RIBA, celebrates its eightieth birthday this year. Margaret Richardson marks the date by looking back at the remarkable story of the design and construction of the building by G. Grey Wornum, who gathered about him a group of young artists and craftsmen to execute the elaborate details that contribute so much to its distinctive qualities

Opposite View of the main façade, 66 Portland Place, the headquarters of the RIBA, 1932–4, designed by G. Grey Wornum. All black-andwhite photographs by Dell and Wainwright, 1934, © Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

28

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

The RIBA Building was designed by the architect George Grey Wornum and built in 1932–4. It is a classic example of a 1930s building, representing a compromise between the classicists and modernists; a building commissioned by architects for architects. Its sculpture and decoration made the building into an amazing casket of contemporary art, an English version of Stockholm City Hall. So many features were Swedish – the walnut veneer on the first-floor sliding doors and the engraved glass on the main staircase and in the Florence Hall – but its iconography referred to English architecture and did very well in dressing the building as an Institute of Architects.

It is a wonderful building to visit and the general public can see almost all the splendid interiors. The use of different materials – stone, marble, wood and bronze – as well as the sculpture and plaster reliefs, all add to our aesthetic enjoyment, and the symbolism of the building can be easily appreciated.

The Institute had moved its quarters three times between its foundation in 1834 and 1860, but by the latter date was established at 9 Conduit Street, an elegant town-house designed

by James Wyatt. Here the RIBA had the settled air of a London club, but by the late 1920s there was a shortage of space, particularly for the Library. It was essential to move elsewhere, and in March 1929 the RIBA acquired a 999-year lease for a corner site at 62–68 Portland Place and 14–20 Weymouth Street. It was decided that an open competition should be held for a new building; the conditions were issued in April 1931 and the submission date was 31 March 1932. There were 284 entrants.

In early May the winner, G. Grey Wornum, was announced. Grey Wornum was elegant and tactful, a modernist of the non-progressive kind. From 1914 to 1918 he had served with the

Artists’ Rifles and the Durham Light Infantry.

He was badly wounded at the Somme and lost his right eye. His American wife, Miriam Wornum, was an artist and interior designer and collaborated with him on many schemes, including the RIBA Building. Wornum had led the Architectural Association excursion to Stockholm in 1930 and there met Ragnar Östberg, the architect of Stockholm City Hall (1923), a building that clearly inspired his design for the RIBA. The building was finished by November 1934 and opened by King George V and Queen Mary.

It seemed to fulfil the Institute’s brief, providing room to expand its activities and to project a contemporary modernist image. The opening of the new building was accompanied by a series of important exhibitions, notably International Architecture in 1934 and Everyday Things in 1936. The new, very fine Library attracted architectural students and scholars from all over the world, as it continues to do today.

The building’s main façade forms an austere and symmetrical rectangle of Portland stone dominated by a giant central window, influenced

by Gunnar Asplund’s City Library in Stockholm of 1920–8. The window is surmounted by the sculpted relief figure of Architectural Aspiration

by Bainbridge Copnall and flanked by figures on columns by James Woodford, depicting Man and Woman as the creative forces of architecture. The cast bronze entrance doors were also modelled

by Woodford, with a series of reliefs depicting ‘London’s rivers and its buildings’. Copnall also sculpted the figures along the Weymouth Street elevation. The central one depicts the Architect (Christopher Wren), flanked by the Painter (with paintbrush) and Sculptor (with hammer) and, at the ends, by the Artisan (with crossed arms) and the Mechanic (with tools).

When selecting his artists and craftsmen A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

29

Wornum turned to a young and unknown group to work on the building, installing Copnall on the ground floor and basement of 68 Portland Place, where he could live and work free of rent, with a salary of £5 per week as well as a bonus on completion. No.68 became the home and studio for the craftsmen on site. Charles Reilly in Scaffolding in the Sky (1938) described the arrangement: ‘Grey Wornum and his artist wife, like Östberg and his, gathered a group of sculptors, glass engravers and craftsmen of all kinds, as well as draughtsmen, to work together practically on the site. Fortunately the RIBA owned the building next door and here he housed them all, some for the day only, some for the nights as well. I went to one or two of the jolly daily luncheons there with Grey at one end of the table and Miriam, his wife, at the other and all his merry company of workers.’

In the Entrance Hall the walls are lined with polished Perrycot limestone, with the names of the Royal Gold medallists incised on the lefthand side and the past presidents on the right.

Barber Osgerby’s splendid Reception desk is a new addition. The lifts and the new exhibition gallery are on the left. The panel set in the pale yellow terrazzo floor in front of the lifts, a decorative arrangement of a typewriter, postbox, letters and books, is signed ‘MGW’ (Miriam and Grey Wornum) and is one of three on this floor depicting the instruments of office routine, designed by Bainbridge Copnall.

From the Entrance Hall the main stairs lead down to the Foyer and the Henry Jarvis Hall, the main lecture hall of the RIBA. The panelling and woodwork of the Hall is of teak, olive ash and black bean, and above the doors are acoustic panels by Copnall decorated with formal compositions, one of books and papers and the other of T-squares and drawing boards.

The area around the Main Staircase is the most beautifully detailed space in the building. The risers of the stairs are of black Derbyshire marble and the stairwell linings are of Perrycot limestone. The balustrading is of Armourplate glass set in silver bronze frames, with handrails of golden bronze and ebonised mahogany. This is the principal ceremonial area of the building and the general effect at this level is one of transparency and spaciousness.

Facing the stairs on the First Floor are the large sliding doors made of English walnut with panels of Indian laurel-wood featuring decorative curls, which open into the Exhibition Room. Set in the ceiling of the first-floor landings are six plaster panels designed by James Woodford. They depict human figures representing the main periods of English 30

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Clockwise from opposite, top View down the main staircase from the first floor. Photograph © Philip Vile, 2013.

Bronze entrance doors by James Woodford.

Detail of one of the piers in the Florence Hall, showing Maurice Webb, Chairman of the New Building Committee, on the left, and G. Grey Wornum, right.

Panel from the Dominion screen in the Florence Hall, representing South Africa, to a design by Dennis Dunlop, and carved in Quebec pine.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

31

architecture, with ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Tudor’ on the Weymouth Street side, and ‘Norman’, ‘Perpendicular’ (where the figure was modelled on Miriam Wornum) and ‘Saxon’ on the north (lift) side.

The Florence Hall was originally designed as the Institute’s principal Reception Room and continues to host dinners, awards ceremonies, drinks receptions and private celebrations. Its main features are the deeply splayed piers of Perrycot stone, which are incised with a series of carvings representing ‘Man and his buildings throughout the ages’. They were executed by stonemasons from full-size cartoons by Copnall.

On the splayed side of one of the piers on the north, terrace side are, from the top: Östberg seated at his drawing board, Grey Wornum (with monocle) and Maurice Webb, Chairman of the Building Committee. On the front of the same pier are what were considered to be three great buildings of the twentieth century: Giles Gilbert Scott’s Liverpool Cathedral (from 1903), Edwin Lutyens’s unbuilt design for the Liverpool Roman Catholic Cathedral (1929) and Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall.

The lower ceilings in the Hall on the north and south sides contain plaster reliefs by Woodford, which represent the principal trades of the building industry. Many contain portraits of the men who worked on the building. They are, from the door on the north terrace side: the Electrician (a portrait of Woodford), Plumber, Fitter, Carpenter and Engraver, and on the Weymouth Street side, the Slater, Glass Cutter (a portrait of Jan Juta who etched all the glass in the RIBA building), Steel Erector, Plasterer and Bricklayer. It was remarkable during this period that Wornum acknowledged the contribution of the different building trades by including these visual references. Below the large east window is the Dominion screen, of Quebec pine, which is carved to the designs of Dennis Dunlop to 32

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

represent the peoples, industries, flora and fauna of the dominions of Canada, Australia, India, South Africa and New Zealand.

Continuing upwards, near the lifts, a side staircase leads to the second floor. The jambs (side panels) and soffits (panels above the balcony) of this stair are decorated with creamand-gold plaster, modelled by Copnall to illustrate the tools used on the building, such as a brick hod. On the second floor one can appreciate the great feeling of spaciousness of the building’s interior and the dramatic height of the central stairwell with its four massive columns, concrete-clad steel stanchions, each cased with black Ashburton marble and without bases or capitals.

The third floor contains the British Architectural Library, widely acknowledged to be the finest architectural library in the world.

It consists of two sections, the lower area for books and the Periodicals Gallery above.

Wornum worked with the Librarian and with his wife Miriam to create a colour scheme that was the antithesis of the club-like sombreness of the Wyatt building at Conduit Street. The main section is formed by projecting steel bookcases, stove-enamelled in blue, which form reading alcoves. The reading tables are of Indian silver greywood, with blue linoleum tops to match the colour of the bookcases. The chairs are of natural English beech, upholstered in leather, and both the chairs and tables are original, dating from 1934. Although there have been alterations to the building since 1934, it is remarkable that they are so tactful and selfeffacing.

The RIBA building, designed as the London headquarters of the architectural profession, is a wonderful period piece of the interwar years, expressing in its design and craftsmanship the contemporary modernity of 1930s English architecture.

Above, left Plaster panel depicting a brick hod, modelled by Bainbridge Copnall, on the second-floor staircase.

Photograph © Wilson Yau, 2014.

Above, right Miriam Wornum’s design for the colour decoration of the Library, 1934. © RIBA Library Drawings Collection.

Opposite The Dominion screen below the large east window in the Florence Hall.

Discover more: join fellow Friends for a (free) tour of 66 Portland Place, led by our knowledgeable building tourguides. Please see page 60 for further details or contact the Friends office – friends@riba.org.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

33

Other buildings at

80

In the 1930s there was no consensus about what style to build in, and there were many types of pioneering buildings in London apart from the examples of flat-roofed Modernism that generally get the most attention today. Catherine Croft selects three buildings from that decade around the city, whose very different styles would have looked radically new to a contemporary passer-by, and reflect the wide variety of architectural designs produced during that period.

The Odeon

Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, London, 1937,

by Harry Weedon. © Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

34

This flagship cinema of the Odeon chain opened in 1937 on a prominent site in Leicester Square, already a popular entertainment hub. It was designed to grab public attention, with a striking black granite façade, a tall tower displaying neon signage, and a very elaborate Art Deco interior.

The cinema originally accommodated more than 2,000 people on faux-leopardskin seats.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

The deeply ribbed plaster ceiling, enhanced by concealed strip lighting, enveloped the audience and focused attention forward. Bas-relief sculptures of naked nymphs by Raymond Briton Riviere were positioned at either side of the proscenium, as if leaping towards the screen.

At this time Oscar Deutsch, who founded the cinema chain in 1928, was rapidly expanding his business, and he employed Birmingham architect Harry Weedon to oversee the design and construction of over 250 of the Odeons that opened between 1934 and the outbreak of war.

Weedon proved to be an inspired and successful choice. In this instance he collaborated directly with the London-area Odeon designer, Andrew Mather. Weedon was influenced by the recent work by Erich Mendelsohn and Hans Poelzig in Germany, and developed a distinctive style for the Odeon cinemas that projected a sense of glamour, modernity and excitement. Usually this was achieved at modest cost using simple materials, but this building cost five times as much per seat than the average regional cinema.

Its external canopies were bronze, and the black granite panels were each 6ft x 5ft. It had a fullsize stage and an orchestra pit that could be raised to stage level. Sadly almost all the interior was destroyed during extensive modernisations in 1967 and, although the Compton organ was retained and the nymphs and some features have been reinstated, the building is currently threatened with demolition.

Arnos Grove underground railway station, 1932,

by Charles Holden, Grade II*. © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Arnos Grove The flat-roofed, cylindrical booking hall of Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove tube station must have seemed extraordinary when it was first constructed on the Piccadilly line extension to this north London suburb. It is the best known of Holden’s series of starkly geometric tube stations, which did much to introduce the British public to the forms of European Modernism.

Holden and his pioneering client, Frank Pick, had travelled together in 1930 to Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, and were particularly impressed by the work of Dutch architect Willem Dudok. Pick saw

architecture as a vital part of a complete design package, creating in effect one of the first examples of corporate branding, which included a new typeface and logo by Edward Johnston, as well as specially designed lighting, ticket-machines and seating throughout the network. Arnos Grove looks especially impressive at night, when lit from within.

It is not structurally innovative, its materials are modest and simply detailed (a reinforced concrete frame is in-filled with brick), but it was highly regarded at the time, both in the UK and abroad, and is still admired today.

Russell Court Replacing a row of dilapidated Georgian houses, this ten-storey brick block of piedà-terre flats was instantly popular, offering a convenient extension to the modern lifestyles of its enthusiastic residents. Each flat is tiny, essentially a small studio, which originally had only a rudimentary pantry rather than a kitchen.

Downstairs there was a communal dining room, but the flats were primarily a place to spend the night after an evening at a restaurant or theatre.

The building was designed with car ownership in mind. Its most dramatic elevation is the concave corner with ribbon windows above the original petrol station (a glamorous asset in 1937), and at basement level there is a columnfree parking garage, a feature only achievable by using vast amounts of reinforcement to the ground-floor slab. Constructing this necessitated the involvement of the specialist engineers L.B. Mouchard and Partners, known for their work on pioneering concrete structures. With metal windows and crisp, stripped-back detailing

on its parsimoniously deployed precast stone decorative elements, it is modern rather than being historicist or neo-Georgian in inspiration.

Russell Court private flats, 1937, by George Val Myer. © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

35

Going solo

RCR have hardly pulled their punches, not least in their use of rusting Corten steel for the exterior, which creates a dramatic effect in the context of this rather banal part of town.

The worldwide attention that the opening of a single-artist museum can attract is a great boost to the public recognition of its subject, particularly when the building is as extraordinary as the recently opened Musée Soulages in Rodez. From such remarkable structures to museums that are decaying houses once inhabited by obscure figures in mountain towns, Adrian Dannatt assesses the charms and follies of the one-person museum.

Bold as it is big, the brand new Musée Soulages, which opened its cantilevered glass entrance to the public in May this year, is not only a remarkable building but also the ultimate exemplar of the one-artist museum.

And whilst there can be nothing more pleasing for any artist so honoured, such museums pose a series of immediate questions about cultural infrastructure, local governance, tourism and indeed immortality, potentially making them the most fraught of architectural projects.

Pierre Soulages, without challenge France’s greatest living artist, was born 94 years ago in Rodez, a small city in the south of the Aveyron, 36

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

which is known, if at all, for its cathedral and among the more literary for being where the avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud received electroshock treatment for his mental problems during the war.

The decision to build this unique institution in Soulages’s hometown came in 2004 after he made a major donation of work to Rodez, comprising more than 500 pieces from every period of his vast career, having been previously courted by other towns, notably Montpellier, about the possibility of creating a museum dedicated to his work. Further donations followed, as well as a decade’s worth

Musée Soulages, Rodez, designed by RCR Arquitectes, opened in 2014.

Musée Soulages – RCR Arquitectes – © Photothèque Grand Rodez/Cédric Méravilles.

of bureaucratic and administrative meetings and committees, and in 2007 an international architectural competition was launched. Nearly a hundred submissions were received and four finalists selected, including such notables as Paul Andreu and Kengo Kuma, as well as Marc Barani, a Nice architect who had worked on the renovation of the nearby Musée Fernand Léger.

The winning firm was RCR Arquitectes, a Catalan practice of three partners, Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta. They worked with the Narbonne-based firm Passelac Roques to build their extraordinary vision, a series of interlocking metal cubes set in 3 hectares of

park that dominates a hillside site in the centre of town. This is a big project in every sense, with an estimated final budget of nearly 22m euros, 4m of which came from the Région Midi-Pyrénées. It seems a notably ambitious purpose-built structure to showcase just one painter, although Soulages also insisted on a large temporary exhibition space for work by other artists. And RCR have hardly pulled their punches, not least in their use of rusting Corten steel for the exterior, which creates a dramatic effect in the context of this rather banal part of town. It also perfectly suits the ‘Brou de Noix’, walnut-stain palette of Soulages, the architects A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

37

Above Pierre Soulages, Musée Soulages, Rodez, 2014. Musée Soulages – RCR Arquitectes – © Photothèque Grand Rodez/Cédric Méravilles.

Right Works by Soulages on display at the Musée Soulages.

RCR Arquitectes – © Photothèque Grand Rodez/Cédric Méravilles.

clearly being careful to avoid any emphasis on black, always wrongly and widely assumed to be Soulages’s only colour. Striking as it is from the outside, like a series of low-slung shipping containers designed by a luxury packager, the four levels within – flowing together with a highly sophisticated sense of circulation – do absolute justice to the art around which they were built, balancing serene high spaces with a sombre colour scheme and carefully controlled natural light, a highly sensual if not tactile cradle for this fine collection.

I have always been fascinated by oneperson museums and must admit to a perverse penchant for seeking out museums of the most obscure figures in the least-known towns, and there exploring the crumbling remains of their own domicile and the faded relics of a now almost forgotten existence. Thus my own taste is more for the decaying house of Francis Jammes, that prolific once-famous poet, which I discovered by chance in the mountain town of Orthez in south-west France, than for any hightech, state-sponsored behemoth. Yet my interest in the Soulages museum is as much anecdotal as aesthetic, not least because the artist is the same age as my own father, the architect Trevor 38

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Dannatt. They are both 94 and both tall, thin and fit, especially mentally, with perfect recall of a nonpareil database of twentieth-century culture, living testimony to what might as well be termed ‘modernism’.

The real fascination of these places is the gamble that they can withstand the decades, the centenaries and millennia even, and somehow keep the name of that person emblazoned on their portico alive by just the physical presence of the actual building. Ozymandias springs to mind, but it is probably just too early to tell; after all what is probably the oldest of such institutions, Giorgio Vasari’s house in Arezzo, dates to around 1540, and there is no record of the many one-person house museums that must have closed over the centuries due to lack of funds or fans. And when it comes to these recent, specially built contemporary museums, long, long before any architectural plans, let alone the onerous work of construction, comes the far more complex and labyrinthine process of even approving such an institution.

For it is far harder than one might imagine to find someone to take on the obligations of maintaining an art collection or just a library, let alone an entire oeuvre to be kept together in perpetuity. And despite the seeming simplicity of such structures as Rudy Ricciotti’s purpose40

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

built 2011 Musée Jean Cocteau in Menton, or the nearby Eileen Gray house (designed and built by Gray and Jean Badovici in 1926–9) at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin – which is currently being restored as a museum and study centre – the reality of such personal archival preservation, let alone fundraising and everyday management, is vastly more complex, costly and labyrinthine than their physical envelopes ever suggest.

Considering all the requirements – not just of fame but fortune, and longevity as well as luck – it is surprising how many solo museums do exist. In Britain we have some particularly fine examples, and curiously, considering our generally low opinion of the profession, as many in honour of architects as artists. These include 2 Willow Road, Ernö Goldfinger’s house in Hampstead, Augustus Pugin’s recently restored home, the Grange in Ramsgate, the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and perhaps the William Morris residence, now a museum in Walthamstow, while it is rumoured that memorial mausolea are planned by Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. The latter would be a welcome contrast to what are still mainly oneman museums as, aside from Frida Kahlo in Mexico City and Marina Abramovic in Hudson, New York State, and maybe the Marie Petiet’s museum in Limoux, one-woman institutions

Above Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne, by Renzo Piano, opened 2005.

Photograph © Zentrum Paul Klee.

Opposite, above Staircase at Gustave Moreau’s studio, designed by Albert Lafon, 1895, Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris. © RMN / Franck Raux.

Opposite, below Soane Museum, London. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Photograph by Derry Moore.

are thin on the ground. Even the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, despite its name, is not a one-woman museum dedicated to Dame Barbara, although her St Ives studio is happily preserved as the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. But it is notably rare in being one of the few purpose-built of such museums, for which David Chipperfield won the 2012 RIBA Regional Building of the Year.

Among the few entirely new structures comparable in grandeur to the Musée Soulages are Renzo Piano’s Zentrum Paul Klee created in Berne in 2005, and the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. The latter was the result of a particularly laborious search for a city rich and courageous enough to commit itself to the strict stipulations of the artist’s will. Thankfully the final building, unveiled in 2011, was worth the effort, and is an exceptionally elegant exercise in treated concrete that shows his work to perfection. Even better, Still had specified that his museum must have neither auditorium nor restaurant, those two annoying obligations; the Musée Soulages by contrast boasts a special café by the world-famous local chef Michel Bras. If only more all-powerful artists were able to ban in advance such irritations, as well as gift shops, audio-guides and, above all, huge, pointless space-wasting show-off mezzanines.

With the exception of Paris, seemingly packed with nineteenth-century buildings dedicated to everyone from Gustave Moreau and Eugène Delacroix to Pablo Picasso (who has the honour of two other such museums, in Antibes and his native Barcelona), most capital cities do not have the space to be able to afford such single-artist institutions. Thus London only has Leighton House in Kensington, in an 1860s building by George Aitchison, and Hogarth’s House (c.1700), if Chiswick counts, while Manhattan, surprisingly, has only the Nicholas Roerich Museum in a brownstone on West 107th Street. Meanwhile Mexico City itself has the magnificent Museo Tamayo, which has existed since 1981 – an extraordinary and beautiful purpose-built one-artist museum.

If I were forced to choose a favourite museum, it would not be the remarkable new structure that now dominates old Rodez, but rather a small house on a side street in Buenos Aires. For here, at the Museo Xul Solar, a bizarre and brilliant Argentinian artist has found his perfect final home, with the architect Pablo Tomas Beitia conjuring up a veritable concrete Piranesian prison, entirely modern, opened in 1993, and yet attractively archaic, infinitely ancient.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

41

What makes an award-winning building?

The RIBA Awards programme champions and celebrates the best of British architecture. RIBA awards reflect changes in architectural tastes, technology and aspirations, but at their core is a commitment to the understanding and enjoyment of buildings and spaces. Every year, the RIBA Stirling Prize is presented to the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture over the past year. Peter Clegg, architect and former Chairman of the RIBA Awards group, offers an insider’s view of the decision-making process.

Were there any early influences on you that inspired you to become an architect – a building you remember as a child, for example, or the work of particular architects?

I never knew my paternal grandfather but he was a secondary-school head teacher who helped design his own school.

I remember thinking that in an extended family of teachers and educationalists here was someone who had escaped! On a family holiday as a young teenager, I persuaded my father to take a detour to see Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, and we were all blown away by it.

Where did you train to become an architect and what did you learn from your early years in the profession?

42

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

I trained at Cambridge and Yale.

In the UK it was a time when the public appreciation of what architects did was at an all-time low, so we needed to listen and learn and re-engage socially with our roots. In the USA at the time the intellectual debate was stronger, as was the recognition that architects could make real changes, socially and environmentally.

Your area of expertise is in environmental design. When did you start becoming interested in this aspect of architectural practice, and how has it influenced your designs?

I was at university during the first oil crisis, so saving energy through passive design became a bit of an obsession. My thesis at Yale, ‘Decentralized Service Systems for Housing’, was bought

by a publishing company and republished as New Low Cost Sources of Energy for the Home.

Not a very catchy title, but it sold 100,000 copies in the States, which showed the extent of public interest. The concept of saving energy later translated into reducing carbon emissions and pushing the boundaries of low-carbon design, but it also impacted on the form and detailing of our work, for instance at the National Trust headquarters and the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School.

What are the judging criteria when selecting the shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize?

There is a whole range of criteria including functionality, sustainability and the quality of detailing, but the RIBA are

scrupulous about visiting buildings and talking to owners and users, and it is these conversations that are often critical in the decisionmaking process.

Does the panel ever have irreconcilable differences of opinion, and if so how do you resolve the debate? How do you choose between such a disparate group of designs when making your selection, from skyscrapers to individual conservation projects on small buildings?

The differences of opinion are what make the quality of debate at the national panel so invigorating. Most of the time there is agreement but occasionally opinions will sway erratically. Generally we reach a consensus and only occasionally do we have a show of hands, but that is usually to bring a heated debate

to a conclusion. This is bound to happen between designers from different backgrounds, and the range of projects – this year we gave National awards to the Shard as well as to a shelter for a work of art at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – is evidence of the breadth of our impact as a profession.

‘The one that got away’: is there a shortlisted building that, on reflection, you feel should have been awarded the Stirling Prize, and why?

In recent years the one that I really regret not making it was the Hopkins Olympic Velodrome: a beautifully conceived and exquisite piece of architecture and environmental engineering.

Clockwise from left The Olympic Velodrome,

by Hopkins Architects, shortlisted for the 2011 RIBA Stirling Prize.

Photograph © Nathaniel Moore/Hopkins Architects.

The TNG Wells Park Youth Centre, by RCKa, winner of a 2014 RIBA National Award, for an outstanding example of low-cost community architecture. Photograph © Jakob Spriestersbach.

Manchester School of Art, by FCBS, shortlisted for the 2014 RIBA Stirling Prize.

Photograph © Hufton and Crow.

The RIBA awards have been criticised in the past for excluding A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

43

from their selection more experimental, radical architectural designs, focusing instead on the work of professionals who have had a conventional architectural training.

How would you respond to such comments?

I think all the buildings on the Stirling shortlist in the last few years have been experimental and radical in one way or another; if they aren’t, they shouldn’t be there. And the discussions at the national jury are generally positively inclined towards buildings working with limited budgets or unconventional procurement methodologies, often by younger practices. Two postrecession community workspace projects, by Studio 00 and RCKa,

stood out for me in this year’s awards. Doing more with less is something I have tried to champion in my time on the awards panel.

Did winning the 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize for the Accordia housing development in Cambridge have a significant impact on your subsequent commissions?

Two things happened in October 2008: we won the Stirling Prize and there was a global financial meltdown. Our timing wasn’t great, but the prize did help our credibility, particularly abroad.

For many years Accordia became the benchmark for housing, and it introduced the idea of collaboration between practices on larger

projects, which has now become mainstream. Sadly, within ‘urbanedge’ housing the quality we managed to achieve has not been replicated as much as we would have liked.

You have been on the judging panel of the RIBA Awards for several years, won the Stirling Prize in 2008 and your practice has been shortlisted for this year’s Prize. How is this potential conflict of interests resolved?

The rules are very clear about conflicts of interest and we adhere to them scrupulously. Inevitably if you select a panel of high-calibre architects on a jury, every now and then one of them is going to have

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

William Mann Witherford Watson Mann Architects

Witherford Watson Mann Architects won the 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize for their work on Astley Castle, a groundbreaking modern holiday home inserted into the crumbling walls of an ancient moated castle.

What was it about this design that made it stand out from the competition?

It achieved a paradigm shift in the way one looks at new insertions into old fabric, breaking the old rules about separation of new and old and delighting in the reconsolidation of a powerful ancient structure. The key thing about the Stirling is that it is awarded to the building that makes the greatest contribution to the profession in that particular year, and that can be in a very specific area of our work, in this case the nature of building conservation.

Do you consider that we are living through a golden age in British architecture?

It’s certainly healthier than it was in the early 1970s when I was going through architecture school.

There is much more recognition of what the profession can contribute to urban design and the quality of public buildings. Architects are really respected for their contribution to cultural buildings, higher education and, with the departure of Michael Gove, we might even become recognised again for delivering high-quality low-cost school environments! The UK is hugely respected abroad for the quality of our architecture and environmental engineering, and the introduction of a new RIBA International Prize next year should build on that recognition.

44

The impact on our practice of winning the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2013 for Best New Building of the Year

a building up for consideration, and they have to leave the room during the discussion. If anything I think we are harder on our fellow jury members. When I have had projects reach the Stirling mid-list I have had nothing more to do with the process and my deputy, Philip Gurmudjen has taken over.

Clockwise from opposite, far left Accordia, Cambridge,

by FCBS with Alison Brooks and Macreanor Lavington, winner of the 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize, the only time the award has been given to a housing scheme.

Photograph © Tim Crocker.

The Worshipful company of Drapers were delighted that the new Academy that they funded, designed

by FCBS, won a 2014 RIBA National Award.

Photograph © Timothy Soar.

Astley Castle, Warwickshire, designed

by Witherford Watson Mann Architects, winner of the 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize. Photograph © Helene Binet.

So much of this business is about trust and confidence, yet these are very hard things to build up. Winning the RIBA Stirling Prize for our work at Astley Castle has definitely helped us to gain more people’s trust.

It’s worth pointing out how thorough the Stirling judging process is: there’s nothing casual or hasty about it, and it’s absolutely focused on the reality of the building. One comment that jurors repeatedly made was that the photos didn’t do justice to our project. This is not because our photos aren’t good, but because architecture is all about being there and experiencing it first hand. I think the thoroughness of the judging gives the prize a lot of authority.

The first impact of the win was that our existing clients had a bit more confidence in us. Clients for housing projects, public spaces or industrial buildings – we haven’t got any other castles on the books – could see the relevance of the ideas at Astley to what we were doing for them. Making the most of what’s already there, and doing that by grafting the new on to the old, binding them together in a crafted way: we hadn’t always been able to get these ideas across, but now it feels as if we are pushing at an open door.

We’ve also been invited to lecture and talk about our work more, which has challenged us to articulate things that we maybe took for granted, or to open up new questions that follow on.

More recently, we have been entrusted with a number of very engaging projects: a major public space in London, an art gallery, a new almshouse, and a historic college in Cambridge. Obviously we had to work hard and be persuasive to be considered for these, but I think these clients were prepared to take a little more on trust because of the prize.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

45

From the Collections RIBA’s Head of Collections, Kent Rawlinson, picks out ten classic images of Big Ben from the RIBA British Architectural Library, including some of Barry’s own early designs.

Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860) is famous as the architect who rebuilt the Houses of Parliament in the late 1830s.

He was also a founder member of the RIBA and one of the first donors to the Institute’s nascent collection of architectural drawings, models, books, manuscripts and photographs. Today this collection is in many respects the oldest, largest and richest of its kind, recording thousands of years of architectural practice and every type of building. Fittingly, few buildings are as iconic as Barry’s own clock tower for the Houses of Parliament, lovingly known to millions across the globe as Big Ben.

This sketch may be Barry’s first design for the face of the world’s most famous clock. The completed clock, which was the largest in Britain and cost £2,500, began keeping time on 31 May 1859.

46

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Barry won the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament, gutted by fire two years previously, in 1836. Covering eight acres, his new buildings were described in 1860 as ‘the greatest combination of contrivance in planning, skill in construction, business management, and true art, that the world has seen’.

The committee responsible for the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament stipulated the use of an appropriate ‘national’ Gothic or Elizabethan style. The clock tower and face of Big Ben epitomise this sumptuous style, and are richly decorated with Gothic tracery, gilding and heraldry.

Opposite, far left Design for a clock face for the Houses of Parliament, 1838, by Charles Barry.

Opposite, left Charles Barry, 1861, published the year after his death.

Above Design for a clock face for the House of Parliament, 1838, by Charles Barry.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

47

Barry claimed that ‘between 8,000 and 9,000 original drawings and models have been prepared … a large portion of which have emanated from my own hand’. These early sketches show Barry experimenting with different outline forms for the clock tower.

The Gothic façades of Barry’s towers hid many ingenious and revolutionary approaches to engineering, required by their extraordinary size and height, such as the use of internal (rather than external) scaffolding.

Big Ben is often seen and approached from Waterloo Bridge. Thomas Page’s new bridge was completed in 1862, and both structures appear in this watercolour by Richard Westmacott, who helped judge the competition for the frescoes that decorate the interiors of Barry’s new buildings.

Above View of Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from the South Bank of the River Thames, c.1865, by Richard Westmacott the Younger.

Left The Houses of Parliament seen at dusk, 2000, photograph © Pawel Libera.

Photography was invented during Barry’s lifetime, and a collection of photographs was rapidly assembled by the RIBA. This early example shows the Houses of Parliament soon after completion, when the Victoria Tower, left, was still celebrated as ‘the largest and highest square tower in the world’.

Clockwise from top left Preliminary designs for the new clock tower for the Houses of Parliament, early 1840s,

by Charles Barry.

48

Illustration by Barry from his publication Some Description of the Mechanical Scaffolding Used at the New Palace of Westminster (1856).

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

The Big Ben clock tower seen at night from Parliament Square, 1970, photograph by Edwin Smith.

The Houses of Parliament, seen from the south bank of the River Thames, 1870s, photograph by Horatio Nelson King.

In this photograph, Edwin Smith – that architectural photographer par excellence – has captured the iconic nature of Big Ben.

Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament rank among the most recognisable and photographed buildings in the world, yet contemporary images such as this by Pawel Libera – which recalls Westmacott’s earlier watercolour – are still capable of altering our perception of Barry’s masterpiece.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

49

5 contemporary gardens best …

The last two decades have seen the greatest investment in the design of great contemporary gardens since the Edwardian age, suggests Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum, London. He has picked five that demonstrate a fusion of architectural design and gardening, and are open to the public. Long before Open House London – in 1927, to be precise – private gardens have opened to the public on behalf of charity and as part of the National Gardens Scheme, with over 3,800 of them on view in 2014.

Broughton Grange In 2000 Stephen Hester commissioned the first great garden of the new millennium, Broughton Grange in Oxfordshire, designed by the landscape designer Tom StuartSmith with support from the architect Ptolemy Dean. What is startling is that it is a walled garden built from scratch on an open hillside – which has the unintended effect of looking ‘a little like an aircraft carrier parked in a field’, according to the designer – although it is open to views of

the countryside to the south and east. There is no physical or visual relationship to the house itself: the client imagined the garden as a selfcontained space into which to escape.

Inside are three terraces, whose planting changes from level to level. At the top is hot and dry Mediterranean planting, and at the bottom a box parterre whose pattern is a magnified slice of the cell structure of an oak tree; StuartSmith’s first degree was in zoology. In

the middle terrace is a void: a black, still pool. In an essay in response to James Woods’s ‘How Fiction Works’, Stuart-Smith – you’ve guessed it: not just the king of the Chelsea Flower Show but a genuine polymath – explores how a garden can open up as many routes and reflections as a novel. Narrow your eyes in the sun and the tall, topiarised yews are a memory of the 28 stone caryatids that guard the walled garden in the woods at the Villa Farnese, Caprarola.

‘Orpheus’, 2010, by Kim Wilkie, Boughton House. Photograph © Euan Myles, boughtonhouse.co.uk

Above Steel cube on top of a golden-section spiral, 2010, by Kim Wilkie, Boughton House.

Photograph © Euan Myles, boughtonhouse.co.uk

Opposite Topiary, Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire, 2000, landscape design by Tom Stuart-Smith with architect Ptolemy Dean.

Photograph © Andrew Woodhall.

50

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

‘Orpheus’, Boughton House Boughton House, near Kettering in Northamptonshire, is one of the prodigious Baroque country houses built by the oligarchs of the Restoration, but the vast formal garden was never completed. In 2004 the Duke of Buccleuch showed Kim Wilkie an unresolved grass square 800 metres from the house, adjacent to a grass pyramid built early in the eighteenth century as the base of his ancestor’s mausoleum.

What would you do? ‘Why not go

down rather than up?’ replied Wilkie, a landscape architect whose most recognisable signature is landforms drawing out the geometry of a place.

He designed an inverted pyramid, 50 x 50 metres and 7 metres below the water table, with a grass path descending Escher-like to black water.

Wilkie cites the sky sculptures of James Turrell as an inspiration, and named the intervention ‘Orpheus’, after the mythical Greek who descended to Hades.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

51

Wooden pavilion, 2001, designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole, Bury Court, near Farnham, Surrey. Photograph by Jerry Harpur.

51 The Chase A favourite in London is 51 The Chase, located in a street of Victorian semi-detached houses in Clapham.

Charles Rutherfoord is a designer of gardens, houses and interiors with a hard-won horticultural knowledge, and his own back garden is a chance to experiment with new planting combinations: each spring he plants 2,000 new tulip bulbs. Rutherfoord is a fan of opening a private garden to the public: ‘The great pleasure that I have found is that visitors provide a spur to develop different parts of the garden so that there is always something new.’ The geodesic dome is firmly ‘Rupert’s dome’, a greenhouse into which Rutherfoord’s partner, Rupert Tyler, vanishes at the end of a day in the City to cultivate favourite plants of his own. This is a playful, happy garden, which is also a repository of deep intelligence.

The greenhouse at 51 The Chase, Clapham, garden design

by Charles Rutherfoord. Tulips ‘Avignon’ and ‘Paul Scherer’ are shown in the foreground, and the tree peony ‘Cardinal Vaughan’ in the background. © Charles Rutherfoord.

The Moorings, Tower Bridge

Bury Court In 1983 John Coke opened a nursery at Bury Court, a farm near Farnham, in Surrey, which he had inherited. One day a tall, ruddy-faced and flaxenhaired Dutchman strode through the door: Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is today world-famous as the planting designer of New York’s High Line, but was then a mysterious grower of grasses and wild-looking perennials, a member of the so-called Dutch Wave of radical plantsmen who rebelled against the artificiality of 52

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

horticulture (think trays of begonias and geraniums in commercial garden centres). Coke commissioned Oudolf to design the first garden in Britain in the new, naturalistic style.

On the opposite side of the barn Coke commissioned a second garden by Christopher Bradley-Hole, who trained – and prospered – as an architect. In 1997 Bradley-Hole exhibited the first of a sequence of gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, which revolutionised perceptions

of garden design by its fusion of architectural Modernism and the planting of vibrant, hardy perennials.

Visit Bury Court at the right time of year and you vanish into BradleyHole’s geometric bed, edged in rusted steel, containing tall perennials. In the centre is an open pavilion, an essay in timber-framed geometry floating in a square of water. For a special treat, visit on Bury Court Plantsman’s days or – better still – its opera season.

Think of Bill Sykes trapped by the tidal ooze of the Thames in Carol Reed’s Oliver! and you can picture the site of the Moorings, an archipelago of house boats in London (face east from Tower Bridge and look for a burst of green beside the old brick wharves a few hundred metres downstream on the south bank of the river). Architect Nick Lacey rescued the derelict boats as an element in a housing development and – uniquely, I think – created a sequence of gardens on their rooftops and the rattling walkway that runs between the individual homes. The design is maintained by a professional gardener, but each garden retains its individuality and appears to reflect the diverse residents of a floating Eden whose apple branches hang lower as the boats tilt with the tide.

The Moorings, Tower Bridge, London’s only floating gardens, mid-1990s, devised by architects Nicholas Lacey & Partners.

Photograph © Teresa Lundquist.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

53

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Gothic Wonder

English Architecture, 1945–1975 Elain Harwood The first major study of the most controversial decades in England’s architecture. Challenging previous scholarship and uncovering new material at the boundaries between architectural and social history, Elain Harwood structures the book around building types to reveal why the architecture takes the form it does.

140 colour + 175 b/w illus.

Hardback £40.00

Architecture 1600–2000 George Frederick Art and Architecture of Ireland, Bodley and the Later Vol IV Gothic Revival in Edited by Rolf Loeber, Hugh Britain and America Campbell, Livia Hurley, John Montague and Ellen Rowley The most complete survey of architecture in Ireland ever published. The essays in this volume cover all aspects of Ireland’s built environment, not only buildings but infrastructure, landscape development, public and private construction and much else.

600 colour illus. Hardback £80.00

Michael Hall George Frederick Bodley fundamentally shaped the architecture, art and design of the Anglican Church throughout England and the world. This important book is the first to explore the life and work of this major Gothic Revival architect.

200 colour + 100 b/w illus.

Hardback £50.00

YaleBooks 54

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

The Wolf House, Ridgway, Colorado, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Johanna Grawunder, 1986–9. © Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radice, courtesy Archivio Ettore Sottsass.

PEVSNER ARCHITECTURAL GUIDES new from THE BUILDINGS OF ENGLAND Cambridgeshire Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner This is the essential companion to the architecture of Cambridgeshire, fully revised for the first time in sixty years and featuring superb new photography.

120 colour + 80 b/w illus.

Hardback £35.00

Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire & Peterborough Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner The first revision in 45 years, this comprehensive volume encompasses the area’s varied landscape and architecture.

120 colour + 80 b/w illus.

Hardback £35.00

Somerset: South and West Julian Orbach and Nikolaus Pevsner Expertly revised and enlarged, this survey is the perfect architectural companion to one of England’s most beautiful regions.

120 colour + 70 b/w illus.

Hardback £35.00

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Published for the Royal Irish Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

280 colour + 120 b/w illus.

Hardback £50.00

Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 Paul Binski In this generously illustrated, wide-ranging and eloquent book, Paul Binski sheds new light on one of the greatest periods of English art and architecture. He offers ground-breaking arguments about the role of invention, making, and the powers of Gothic art and architecture.

Eclectic Ettore

Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art

Space, Hope and Brutalism

Books

Peter Parker selects some of the season’s best architectural books

The Houses of Louis Kahn

Louis I. Kahn in Conversation

George H. Marcus and William Whitaker The first book on Kahn’s residential masterpieces presents a new understanding of the architect’s creative process and approach to building.

‘Quite simply the most important book on Kahn to be published in over two decades.’ – Michael J. Lewis, Williams College, author of American Art and Architecture

Interviews with John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, 1969–70 Edited by Jules David Prown and Karen E. Denavit Largely unpublished interviews from 1969 and 1970 with the great American architect Louis I. Kahn provide remarkable insights into his philosophy of architecture – just as he began his last major work.

100 colour + 150 b/w illus.

Hardback £40.00

tel: 020 7079 4900

77 colour + b/w illus.

Hardback £35.00

www.yalebooks.co.uk

Best known as a designer of Olivetti typewriters and post-modern furniture for the Memphis Group, Ettore Sottsass was in fact a polymath: photographer, architect, painter, sculptor, and designer of interiors, exhibitions, shops, publications, advertisements, posters, glassware, ceramics and jewellery. This huge monograph by Philippe Thomé covers every aspect of his extraordinary life and career. It is arranged chronologically,

with each period subdivided into lavish blocks of illustrations interspersed with pages of text printed on different coloured paper, each one relating to a strand of his output: blue for architecture, orange for industrial design, and so on. As Deyan Sudjic points out in one of four excellent prefatory essays, ‘it is as a designer that Sottsass really established his reputation, but it was through architecture that he defined himself’. He worked in his

father’s architectural practice until 1953, but it was the establishment of his own Sottsass Associati in 1980 that resulted in his most significant buildings, many of them quite as idiosyncratic as his designs for Memphis. Travel in India and the Far East and an immersion in the American counter-culture of the 1960s resulted in projects that were utopian and remained unrealised, but the ideas he had accumulated contributed to the Jasmine Hill Village in Singapore and Milan’s Malpensa Airport as well as the houses he designed for private clients, such as the Bischofberger House in Switzerland and the Mourmans House in Belgium. It is appropriate that Sottsass should be celebrated in a book that matches his own work in its radical and ingenious design.

Sottsass, Philippe Thomé. Phaidon. 500pp. £100.00 ISBN 978 0 7148 6584 3

Stuff happens?

The wanton destruction by German troops of the fourteenthcentury Belgian town of Louvain (now Leuven) in 1914 was widely seen as an unparalleled act of cultural barbarism, but the targeting of art and architecture in wars has a long and dispiriting history. It is not simply that ‘stuff happens’, as Donald Rumsfeld notoriously claimed: the authors of Ravaged, a stimulating if depressing book, argue that, far from being simply an ‘incidental detail’ of warfare, destroying and looting a country’s heritage is done to send a message or make a point, and amounts to ‘a crime against humanity’. From the so-called Baedeker Raids of the Second World War to the blasting to pieces of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001, important and irreplaceable buildings and artworks have fallen victim to conflict and ideology.

Based on a centenary exhibition held in Leuven, this is an angry and timely book, containing a wide-ranging series of essays and eloquent images of what has been lost.

Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, ed. Jo Tollebeek & Eline van Assche. Yale University Press. 304pp. £55.00 ISBN 978 0 300 20447 6

Pierre Alphonse and Pierre Emile Arnou, Leuven University Library after the fire in 1914, 1914. © Leuven, University Archives KU Leuven)/Bruno Vandermeulen.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

55

Books

Books

London Unwrapped Every day we walk past buildings without having any awareness of what architectural marvels might lie within them. Peter Dazeley spent four years photographing hidden and unfamiliar interiors for this book, Unseen London, from the beautifully preserved Art Deco extravagances of the Daily Express Building in Fleet Street to an abandoned and water-damaged military bunker, codenamed ‘Paddock’, in Dollis Hill. Many of these buildings remain inaccessible to the public, while the elegant brick arches of the Kidderpore Reservoir in Hampstead, a sterling example of Victorian engineering skills, were revealed only briefly during restoration work before vanishing from view once more. The book is full of surprises. Who would have thought the Freemason’s Hall boasted such a glorious 1930s interior, or that the Lutyens-designed head office of the Midland Bank in Poultry is so sumptuous that it is currently being converted into a ‘six-star’ hotel? One might expect decorative grandeur in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but almost equally splendid is the main pump room at Crossness Pumping Station, which looks like something designed by William Burges. Mark Daly contributes a lively and informative text, from which we learn, for example, that during the Second World War all 100 tons of the Elgin Marbles were stored in a tunnel at Aldwych Tube station, and that a nuclear reactor used for naval training once lurked beneath the seventeenth-century King William Building at Greenwich. Dazeley’s spectacular photographs open up a whole world of architectural secrets, from synagogues to recording studios, from prisons to power stations, from boxing clubs to bell foundries.

Unseen London, Peter Dazeley & Mark Daly. Frances Lincoln. 304pp. £30.00

Also recommended

Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide

Everyman’s Castle

Evocations of Place

Lovely Bits of Old England

Owen Hopkins has set himself the daunting task of attempting ‘to chart and distil the history of Western architecture into 49 different styles’, arranged chronologically from ancient Greek Classicism to postModern Contextualism. Within each designated style are further sub-categories, all of them illustrated with colour photographs of individual buildings; there is also a very useful glossary of architectural terms. Beautifully done, authoritative and astonishingly inexpensive, this is an essential book for anyone who wants to get a firmer grip on what distinguishes High from Late Gothic or Functionalism from Constructivism.

Nicely combining architectural and social history, Philippa Lewis has written an absorbing and imaginatively illustrated account of the various kinds of dwellings that have been designed for us and the ways in which we have lived in them. From the smoky slums of the industrial North to the airy elegance of Bedford Park, her engaging tour takes in every type of house: country mansions, modish flats, cheerful bungalows, cosy semis, dismal pre-fabs.

Particularly fascinating – and very British – is the part played in domestic design by social customs and rank snobbery.

Edwin Smith trained at the Architectural Association, wanted to be a painter, and turned to photography largely in order to make a living.

The result was some of the most evocative images of landscapes and buildings ever produced during the twentieth century. Written by a leading expert and handsomely illustrated, this fine monograph is republished to coincide with the RIBA’s current retrospective. Every photograph bears out what Smith’s wife and collaborator Olive Cook called his ‘painter’s sense of composition’ and his ‘instinctive understanding of the histrionic power of chiaroscuro’.

Affectionately remembered for his genial television appearances, John Betjeman was also a regular and often controversial contributor to the Telegraph during the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this hugely enjoyable selection of his writing for the newspaper is devoted to ‘the splendours and miseries of British architecture’. Whether praising Huddersfield or deploring the design of motorway bridges and the destruction of railway stations, Betjeman was a skilled polemicist, and ‘Men and Buildings’, his monthly architectural causerie in the Telegraph, placed him in the vanguard of the conservation movement. Perfect, and still persuasive, bedside reading.

Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide, Owen Hopkins.

Laurence King. 240pp. £14.95

Everyman’s Castle, Philippa Lewis.

Frances Lincoln. 264pp. £20.00

Evocations of Place, Robert Elwall.

Merrell/RIBA. 176pp. £25.00

ISBN 978 0 7112 3338 6

ISBN 978 1 8589 4638 2

Lovely Bits of Old England, John Betjeman, ed. Gavin Fuller.

Aurum Press. 230pp. £8.99

ISBN 978 0 7112 3551 9

Kidderpore Service Reservoir, Hampstead, built in 1867, photograph by Peter Dazeley.

Lakeside The Lake District gained a new champion in 1871 when John Ruskin bought a house overlooking Lake Coniston. Ruskin’s social and aesthetic theories led, via William Morris, to the Arts and Crafts movement, and like-minded people were drawn to the area, commissioning architects to build new houses or remodel old ones.

C.F.A. Voysey’s Broadleys (1899–1900) is perhaps the best known, but the Arts and Crafts style was not all swooping roofs and white gables, and it would be hard to imagine anything more different from Voysey’s lightness of touch than Lutyens’ massy sandstone Abbey House near Barrow. What marks out these buildings 56

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Watercolour perspectives and plans of Moor Crag, Gillhead, designed by C.F.A.Voysey, 1899–1901. © RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

is a fine attention to detail, materials and craftsmanship, especially in the interiors to which a whole section in this book, Arts and Crafts Houses in the Lake District, is rightly devoted. Twenty-one houses, by Voysey, Lutyens, Baillie Scott and less familiar names such as Francis Whitwell or Dan Gibson and W.L. Dolman, are expertly described and generously illustrated with drawings, floorplans and Val Corbett’s ravishing photographs.

Arts and Crafts Houses in the Lake District, Matthew Hyde & Esmé Whittaker. Frances Lincoln. 240pp. £35.00 ISBN 978 0 7112 3408 6

ISBN 978 1 78067 163 5

ISBN 978 1 78131 363 3

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

57

RIBA Friends of Architecture Welcome In these pages we will bring you updates from the RIBA, including upcoming event highlights for Friends and Patrons, exhibition previews and news from the British Architectural Library.

RIBA Friends of Architecture is an exciting new initiative for the RIBA and a great way for anyone with an interest in architecture, design and the built world around us to get involved with and support the Institute.

If you haven’t already become a RIBA Friend, please do visit architecture.com/friends to discover more about the wealth of benefits you can enjoy, including: 10% off in the café and bookshop at Portland Place; access to our Friends-only events programme; discounted tickets to all public programme events; an exclusive Friends e-newsletter and this magazine – delivered straight to your door, twice a year.

Friends News What’s On: Exhibitions in 2015

Friends Events The Architecture Gallery at 66 Portland Place. Photograph © Philip Vile.

Mackintosh Architecture In spring 2015, the RIBA, in partnership with the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, presents a fascinating exhibition on Charles Rennie Mackintosh to new audiences in London.

Featuring original drawings, working documents, models, specially commissioned films and archives, Mackintosh Architecture explores the development of one of the UK’s most iconic architects. With a focus on his buildings, the show charts how his style evolved through his commercial practice, his collaboration with others and the impact of the studio environment. The exhibition challenges the notion of Mackintosh as a lone artist.

A season of events accompanies the exhibition, with talks, tours, workshops and late evenings exploring a range of topics, including Mackintosh’s legacy today, the influence of Europe and the great city of Glasgow on his work, and his role as a designer and craftsman.

For event listings and booking information please visit architecture.com/mackintosh

Capturing Beauty: Edwin Smith Exhibition and Building Tour Friday, 21 November, 9.30am – 12 noon

Tuesday, 2 December, from 6.15pm

Inspired by Valeria Carullo’s feature on Edwin Smith? We’re delighted to offer RIBA Friends a curator-led tour of our current exhibition, Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith. The tour will be followed by complimentary tea, coffee and pastries, before we set off on a tour of 66 Portland Place (11am – 12 noon). Over the course of an hour you will take in the building’s fascinating history and stunning 1930s Art Deco architecture, and hear curious stories from our knowledgeable tour-guide.

We’re delighted to offer all Friends who join before 1 December 2014 a free ticket to The Englishness of English Architecture – part of our Edwin Smith season – at 66 Portland Place.

Hear a lively discussion and debate exploring the national traditions of English Architecture, their origins and evidence today. Speakers will include the critic and writer Jonathan Glancey, architectural historian and Chief Executive of English Heritage Simon Thurley, historian, novelist and presenter Lucy Inglis, and Nikolaus Pevsner biographer Susie Harries.

Friends are invited to join us from 6.15pm for a glass of wine and a mince pie, before the talk begins. Friends will also be able to take advantage of an exclusive Christmas shopping discount of 15% in the RIBA Bookshop – a great opportunity to purchase gifts for fellow architecture and design aficionados. The talk will follow at 7.30pm.

Don’t forget – RIBA Friends benefit from discounted access to all other public programme events.

Entrance to the library, Glasgow School of Art, Renfrew Street, Glasgow. Photograph, 1920s, © RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Christmas at RIBA: Discover The Englishness of English Architecture

All Friends events have limited capacity and booking is essential.

Please reserve your place by emailing friends@riba.org or call 0207 307 3810.

For a full list of Friends events, including our architectural walkingtour programme, visit architecture.com/ friendsevents or email friends@riba.org

The 2015 Friends events programme will also be included in your regular Friends e-newsletter.

The next issue will arrive in your inbox in January 2015.

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

59

Friends News

Friends News

Looking for a unique gift for a friend or family member?

Whether for Christmas, a birthday or special anniversary, why not purchase an annual RIBA Friends of Architecture subscription for a fellow fan of architecture and design? We can send a welcome pack to you or to the gift recipient.* We also offer Joint Friends subscriptions for two individuals living at the same address.

For information and details on how to join, visit our website or contact us on 020 7307 3810 or friends@riba.org

* Please order by 10 December 2014 to ensure your pack reaches you or the recipient in time for Christmas 2014.

Your Friends No.

Discover 66 Portland Place: RIBA building tour for RIBA Friends 2pm–3pm on 22 January, 12 March, 14 May and 9 July 2015

Discover the secrets of the RIBA's headquarters at 66 Portland Place with a guided tour of the building. Over the course of an hour you will learn about the building's history and stunning 1930s Art Deco architecture from our knowledgeable tour-guides.

Building tours are free to RIBA Friends, but booking is essential. Please reserve your place by emailing friends@riba.org or call 0207 307 3810.

0000000000

RIBA Friends of Architecture Name: Date of Issue:

/

/

Date of Expiry:

/

/

66 Portland Place.

Photograph © Philip Vile.

Supporting Us There are many ways to help the RIBA, a registered UK charity (no. 210566). You can read more about our Patrons group, American Friends and corporate sponsors online, at architecture.com/supportus.

With the help of all of our supporters, we can continue to: ■■ Host exciting exhibitions in our museum-quality Architecture Gallery ■■ Preserve and celebrate the British Architectural Library and its worldclass collections ■■ Maintain free access to our resources so that all may benefit and learn from the riches available

■■ B ring the subject of architecture alive through inspiring education programmes and workshops, for all ages ■■ Celebrate architectural excellence with an exciting awards programme ■■ Campaign on your behalf for better homes, communities, towns and cities

An exhibition at 66 Portland Place.

Photograph © Philip Vile.

Individual Giving RIBA Patrons

Holmewood House

RIBA’s Patron Programme brings together a key group of supporters who help us in our core mission: to promote architecture to the wider public and conserve our collection of over four million items held in the British Architectural Library.

In return for their support, Patrons receive a number of benefits including invitations to exclusive events that revolve around access to private homes and spaces of exceptional architectural quality. Forthcoming events planned for 2015 include tours of Highclere Castle, the Tower of London, and Lady Helen Hamlyn’s home, Holmewood House.

Holmewood House in Marlow was designed by Robin Partington & Partners in 2007, and has received praise throughout the architectural press for the way the building blends in with the surrounding landscape. The semi-subterranean home is a mostly concrete structure with a grass roof, swimming pool with moving floors and glass walls with 4m-high automated pop-out doors; a unique home which the Patrons and Development team are very much looking forward to viewing in March 2015. We are very grateful to individuals, such as Lady Hamlyn, for supporting RIBA’s work through these invitations into their homes and private spaces.

If you’d like to find out more about the Patrons scheme, please contact Rachel Isherwood, Patrons Manager, on 0207 307 3701, or rachel.isherwood@riba.org

Holmewood House, Marlow, 2007,

by Robin Partington & Partners.

Photograph © William Pryce.

60

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

61

Friends News

Friends News

To celebrate the release of our new publication with O'Donnell + Tuomey, Artifice books on architecture is pleased to offer a 20% discount on Saw Swee Hock The Realisation of the London School of Economics Student Centre.

RRP £19.95 £16 after discount + P&P

American Friends of the British Architectural Library Our American Friends generously support one of the world’s greatest architectural collections, including research, cataloguing, conservation and digitisation, and promote collaborations between the RIBA and American institutions through cultural activities in the US, including exhibitions, educational programmes and scholarly exchanges.

American Founders, Benefactors and Patrons are invited to events in the US and the UK, including annual spring and autumn events in New York and headline RIBA events in London.

Saw Swee Hock

THE REALISATION OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS STUDENT CENTRE

This offer expires on 29 November 2014.

To order please contact sales@artificebooksonline.com quoting SSHO1.

SPECIAL OFFER

14/10/2014 14:34 RICHARD EINZIG/ARCAID

advert.indd 1

Join the C20 Society today Leicester Engineering, 1963

MILES BANBURY

NICK DAWE

The C20 Society campaigns for the conservation of buildings from 1914 onwards. To support this work, and have the chance to come on our exclusive trips and tours, in the UK and abroad, please join us. Membership benefits also include our journal, and three copies of C20 Magazine per year, as well as the satisfaction of knowing you are helping change public attitudes to C20 architecture and design.

High and Over, Amersham, 1930

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, 1935

C20_Ad_Isabel-V02.indd 1

62

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

Join now at www.c20society.org.uk, sign up for our non-member updates, or follow our Director on twitter @catherinecroft

View from Central Park, showing the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Savoy-Plaza Hotel and the Squibb Building, New York, 1930s.

Photograph © Ralph Deakin/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.

Visiting the British Architectural Library Why not pay a visit to the British Architectural Library, one of the largest and most comprehensive architectural resources in the world? Among the four million items are large holdings of books, journals, photographs, drawings and archives that anyone can see.

Access is free and everyone is welcome to explore the collections at 66 Portland Place and at the Victoria and Albert Museum. We have friendly and knowledgeable staff to help all visitors.

We’re open from Tuesday to Saturday; our opening hours vary, so please check architecture.com before you plan your visit.

If you can’t get to us, why not explore images from our collections through RIBApix.com? You can view and order images and prints from the Library’s vast collections of photographs, drawings, engravings and manuscripts.

The American Friends of the British Architectural Library, Inc. (AFBAL) is a 501 (c) (3) registered not-for-profit organisation. For information about the benefits of becoming an American Friend and the forthcoming events programme, please visit afbal.org or email Emily de Vismes, info@afbal.org

Reading Room, British Architectural Library.

Photograph © Philip Vile.

Image: Cardiff School of Architecture.

The RIBA Education Fund: helping students achieve their ambitions With increasing course fees and expenses, architecture is one of the most expensive professions to join.

The Education Fund is dedicated to providing grants to students of architecture, helping to ensure wider participation in architectural education and reducing student drop-out rates. It is only with the support of RIBA Members and sponsors that we can help the best and brightest students reach their full potential.

To learn more about how generous legacies and donations directly support students of architecture throughout the UK, visit architecture.com/educationfund

Get in touch If you have any questions about RIBA Friends of Architecture or if you would like to feed back your comments and ideas about this magazine, please do contact me – Elena Smith, Friends Manager – on 020 7307 3810, or email friends@riba.org. You can also write to RIBA Friends of Architecture, Development Office, 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD. I look forward to hearing from you.

18/09/2014 12:41

A Magazine for RIBA Friends of Architecture

63

Look up Hidden away in Fitzrovia, unnoticed by passers-by on Margaret Street, is a building which once found cannot be forgotten. All Saints Margaret Street, designed in 1850 by William Butterfield and recently described as the site where ‘the revolution in architecture began’, is, paradoxically, tucked away at the back of a dark courtyard. Its steeple, still the second tallest in London and higher than the towers of Westminster Abbey, was once the predominant feature of a Victorian skyline. The polychromatic brick style of the church’s exterior came to dominate Victorian streets all over the country.

The glittering, sumptuous interior offers a dramatic contrast with the exterior, and is an astonishing kaleidoscope of coloured tiles, brick, painting and gilding. This is Butterfield’s ‘savage masterpiece’, and architecturally one of the greatest examples of the High Victorian Gothic style. Whether we are deciphering the narrative of the saint depicted on the tiles in the chancel, or marvelling at the variety of coloured stones encrusted in its pulpit, All Saints rewards close inspection. We may not now share the passionate response of John Ruskin – ‘Having done this, we may do anything; there need be no limits to our hope or our confidence’ – but the spectacle still kindles something romantic within us.

If you are planning a visit to All Saints Margaret Street, please be aware they are carrying out a major electrical refurbishment project and, until midJanuary 2015, will only be open on Saturdays and Sundays between 7am and 7pm (with services at various times). The church will re-open on weekdays from mid-January 2015.

Please check allsaintsmargaretstreet. org.uk for service times, or call the Parish Office on 020 7636 1788.

Altar, All Saints Margaret Street, 1850, designed by William Butterfield. Photograph © Chris Redgrave/ Survey of London, English Heritage, 2014.

ONCE A SOFA. NOW AN INTERGALACTIC SPACE STATION. As your home becomes more important, so does your insurer.

Home insurance 0844 248 1644 | hiscox.co.uk/riba Terms and conditions apply. For full terms and conditions see www.hiscox.co.uk/riba.

The Royal Institute of British Architects is an Introducer Appointed Representative of Hiscox Underwriting Ltd which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

For UK residents only. 13684 09/14

Purism. Sensuality. Intelligence.

To see what else bulthaup kitchens have to offer, please contact your local retail partner www.en.bulthaup.com/dealers

Bath, Belfast, Cheshire, Clerkenwell, Dublin, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Holland Park, Mayfair, Oxford, Putney, Swindon, Winchester