In May 1968, as students rampaged through the streets of Paris, a rather more positive cultural event took place some 30 kilometres to the southwest. Vaux-le-Vicomte, the great 17th-century chateau, the precursor of Versailles, set in its magnificent formal garden, was fully opened to the public for the first time. Given that there is no […] More
A century ago, in the summer of 1915, the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted an exhibition of the work of a living artist for the first time. This was the sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883–1962), to whom two whole galleries were devoted in a display designed by the English architect Charles Holden (who had already collaborated […] More
Ruins are not usually inhabited. By their very nature, they tend to be abandoned, neglected and remote. Such places as Tintern Abbey or Rievaulx were not very hospitable once the original buildings, deliberately built far from centres of population, had been pillaged and made roofless. There can be ruins in city centres, of course, as in […] More
‘We speak of the sky as a vault, a dome,’ wrote W.R. Lethaby in his recondite but influential book of 1891, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth; ‘It may be said that at great periods of architecture ceilings were always skies.’ He was thinking of, among other things, the mosaic-covered vaults and domes of Byzantine churches on […] More
Cities are fragile things. They can burn: Rome in 64 AD (possibly thanks to the Emperor Nero); Constantinople in 1203 (courtesy of the Fourth Crusade); Lisbon in 1755 (because of the earthquake); Moscow in 1812 (thanks to Napoleon); Hamburg in 1842; Chicago in 1871; San Francisco in 1906… But in terms of devastation, few urban […] More
In a notebook dated 1771 Horace Walpole imagined coming upon a ‘Grecian’ and a Gothic building, having never before encountered either style. Which, he asked himself, would he prefer? Since he connected ‘every inanimate thing with the idea of some person’, he would choose Gothic, because he would ‘prefer that building that furnished me with […] More
What does a (British) architect look like? These days he (yes, usually he) might be distinguished by a deeply coloured shirt combined with neo-Corbusian round spectacles; half a century ago he would have sported a bow tie and a neat moustache. But the fact is that most architects look unremarkable – they have to appear […] More
Utopia by Sir Thomas More was first published half a millennium ago this year. The book describes the strange way of life of people on a distant island. It was not presented as an ideal, as the heretic-burning Lord Chancellor (as he became in 1529) cannot seriously have been recommending a society dependent on slavery, […] More
