DENNIS SEVERS’ HOUSE

The exhibition of Simon Pettet’s ceramics at 18 Folgate Street made me visit Dennis Severs’ house in Spitalfields, which I’d meant to do for a long time, with the added incentive of being permitted to take photos, which isn’t normally allowed.

Pettett graduated with a first-class degree in ceramics from Camberwell School of Art in 1983 and met Severs shortly after, moving in to the house that Severs was turning into a replica of what it might have been in the 18th and 19th centuries, telling the story of a family of silk weavers over a period of decline from prosperity to penury.

Pettet’s clever pastiche of Delftware, with current references, like the images of Spitalfields residents Gilbert and George, fit well into this theatrical environment, with its wood fires, half-drawn curtains and unmade beds.

CASA DE SERRALVES

The Casa de Serralves, built on the outskirts of Porto between 1925 and 1944, is a spectacular Art Deco house with significant interior details. It was designed by José Marques da Silva to the commission of Carlos Alberto Cabral, who had been inspired by the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts.

The unusual pink exterior was proposed by Alfred Porteneuve. The interior details, which are well-preserved, were relatively late. Émile-Jacques Ruhlman designed the dining room, hall, salon, cloakroom and billiard room. René Lalique designed the large skylight in the main hall’s ceiling. Edgar Brandt designed the wrought iron gate in the hall. Jean Perzel designed the lamps. The building is now owned by the Serralves Foundation. Restoration was overseen by Álvaro Siza.

THE BARBICAN

The Barbican at night, arguably one of the most forbidding urban developments in London. I took this picture, which looks like a Piranesi nightmare, after leaving a concert at the Barbican Centre.

The route to and from the Centre isn’t intuitive and those who aren’t regular visitors have to be guided from the surrounding streets by a line painted on the ground. The Barbican isn’t legible, in the sense that you can’t read your direction or see where your path is leading. You always seem to be shut in. Its forbidding aspect doesn’t come from the high towers or any lack of human scale but from this sense of being trapped and lost.

Town planners now understand that legibility is needed for a sense of safety and to deter crime. The animal welfare expert Temple Grandin showed that cattle in slaughterhouses were afraid of walkways whose exits they couldn’t see and persuaded the owners to change their layouts. Even the inside of the Barbican Centre is hard to read.

I came out of my concert from one of the many exit doors to find myself in the underground car park. (If a building has too many exits, for all practical purposes it has no exit.) Then a walk to the underground station through a dark vehicle tunnel with a narrow pavement.

CHARLES HOLDEN AND WALTER GROPIUS

In a paper on The Flowering of the Arts in the Inter-War Period (1918 – 1939), Enid Marx has an arresting juxtaposition of pictures, the interior of Picadilly Circus Underground Station, designed by Charles Holden, and the interior of the City Employment Office in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius, both built in 1929. Were they in contact and did Holden go to Dessau? Marx doesn’t say.

Picadilly Circus Underground Station

Dessau Employment Office

STRAWBERRY HILL

One of my favourite guides is Visitor’s London, written by Harold F. Hutchinson for London Transport in the 1950s and reprinted many times. My edition is from 1968. The line illustrations include this one of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill by Gareth Adamson. Hutchinson’s practical prose is elegant enough to be enjoyable for its own sake and although the guide is old, it’s still useful because it covers all of London’s important attractions. When it was written, this little Gothic confection wasn’t open to the public “but permission to see this architectural enterprise is always given to the serious student.” It’s still owned by St Mary’s University (once a Catholic teacher training college) but it was refurbished in 2015 following a very long period of neglect remarkable for such a historically important building. Although not a serious student, I visited the other day.

Its odd arrangement of rooms, many of them impossibly small, is explained by the fact that Walpole intended Strawberry Hill as a place to display the collection to which he devoted his life and which was broken up in 1842. The trustees are attempting to trace and reassemble it, and as he recorded his possessions at length the contents of Strawberry Hill are known and there’s a well-illustrated publication by Silvia Davoli, Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill.

L’ALBERO NASCOSTO, TRIESTE

There was the usual bottle of wine in our room at L’Albero Nascosto in Trieste, but also a notice pointing out that hotels.com take 18% commission from hoteliers and that the best way to support independent hotels like this one is to book direct. In fact we’d done so.

On the afternoon of our arrival we saw an elderly gentleman sitting in the courtyard with a glass of wine. The next morning we saw him clearing the breakfast tables. It was the owner, Aldo Stock. The hotel has his personal touch and is full of things he’s chosen – antique furniture, paintings by Trieste artists and books. There’s also a lounge with an art and design library.

You get a taste of the hotel from its own description: “Our boutique hotel is an eighteenth-century building, without a lift. In its rarefied silence you will be able to appreciate the white stone of Istria, the wood of the walnut tree, of the elm and the cherry, and the precious column from Roman times.”

Aldo used to be an antique dealer, still does some dealing and has a store which you can visit on request.

We went with him to see it a few blocks away. “Dealing in antiques was an elegant occupation,” he said, “But I got tired of it and I prefer to be in the hotel, meeting different people every day.”

His passions are glass and wood. There are items by Gallé and Venini and furniture chosen for its beautiful veneers. Each of the ten rooms is named after a tree.

“Have you lived in Trieste all your life?”

“Except for the first few years. My parents were Jewish and we escaped to Switzerland when I was a baby.” Trieste, which has one of the largest synagogues in Europe, then had a Jewish population of 5,000, now reduced to 500.

He also spent a couple of years in London as a student. “What did you study?” “That wasn’t the important thing: I was in London to learn English.” His English is fluent and his staff speak it well. Spanish, German and French are also spoken.

TRIESTE CATHEDRAL

We climbed to the Castel San Giusto in Trieste to get a view over the town and the seaport. A cruise liner had docked, dwarfing the surrounding buildings. The Cathedral was an afterthought.

Trieste looks like a central European city even a century after being detached from the Austro-Hungarian empire and there are remnants of its former status, from the Orthodox church of St Spyridon and the offices of Generali, the insurance company born in the city, to restaurants serving strudel and sausages with sauerkraut.

The Cathedral of St Justus, a 14th-century basilica on one of the highest points, is from a pre-Habsburg Trieste. It is simple but, on account of its wall paintings and Byzantine mosaics, not austere, and there is a beautiful afternoon light.

NEW CAROLINGIANS

Queen Elizabeth’s reign began with optimism. The war had ended, the dictators had been defeated and the country looked forward to prosperity. Attlee’s government had introduced irreversible improvements and although the NHS and free secondary education are associated with Labour they were Conservative policies too.

The cheerful mood had been deliberately created by the Festival of Britain and was symbolised in the architecture of the Lansbury Estate, the modernity of the Dome of Discovery and the quirkiness of Roland Emmett’s Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway. The watchwords were reconstruction, town planning, full employment and health for all.

With the Festival came the Contemporary style, that tamed British modernism that William Feaver described as “Braced legs, indoor plants, lily-of-the valley sprays of lightbulbs, aluminium lattices, Cotswold-type walling with picture windows, flying staircases, blond wood, the thorn, the spike, the molecule.”

Other symbols were the Royal Festival Hall, the New Towns and the New Universities. The most famous and most fashionable of the new universities was Sussex, designed by Basil Spence, who had worked on the Festival of Britain and had designed the new Coventry Cathedral.

Coventry, a modernist building rising symbolically from the ruins of war, made modern art prominent: Jacob Epstein’s St Michael, Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory, stained-glass by John Piper and candlesticks by Hans Coper.

People knowingly called themselves New Elizabethans. New Elizabethans believed in science. They were wowed by Sputnik, the Comet and the Avro Vulcan aircraft. Food manufacturers boasted that their products were made in modern factories and that they had scientific ingredients. There was no Hovis-style nostalgia and no fear of chemicals. The Two Cultures were united in textile designs based on molecular structures and X-ray crystallography. This was Modern England.

Charles begins his reign in a more insecure, doubtful, and self-critical age. A dictator is waging war in Europe. Many people think the active state that made post-war Britain does more harm than good, that science is a conspiracy of experts and that what we thought was progress will kill us.

Charles himself has channelled much of this doubt. His sincere concern about the environment is why many people like him. He ran a company promoting organic food. His hatred of modern architecture is legendary. His style of dress makes him look older than his father.

But every change creates the hope of a better future. The mood of the country is bound to change. Perhaps we will become New Carolingians.

ARMAZENS CUNHAS, PORTO

Next to the Carmo Church in Porto this fine Art Deco building dominates the Praça Gomes Teixeira. Armazens Cunhas (motto “We Sell Cheaper”) has been selling sheets, bedspreads, tablecloths, pyjamas and work wear in the same way and with the same internal layout for decades with few concessions to modern life and none to tourism.

José de Almeida Cunha founded the company in 1917 and it remains in the same family today. The facade was designed by Manuel Marques, Amoroso Lopes and Coelho Freitas, linking three earlier buildings. The same team of architects also designed the Farmácia Vitália in the Praça Liberdade.

Photo: Manuel V. Botelho (Wikipedia)

ROTHENSTEIN AND LETHABY

William Rothenstein knew everyone in the art world of the early 20th century, so his memoirs – Men and Memories and After Fifty – are informative as well as entertaining. Since I’ve been writing about W. R. Lethaby, I thought I should go and see what Rothenstein had to say about him. Not surprisingly they knew one another well. They visited Paris and Chartres together. Rothenstein respected Lethaby’s scholarship, judgement and integrity and his contribution to the crafts. I’ve copied the relevant passage below.

Rothenstein became principal of the Royal College of Art shortly after Lethaby had retired as professor of design and while his infliuence was still strongly felt. In a confidential memorandum Rothenstein expressed reservations about the air of medievalism that he’d left behind him and the poor work being done in some of the subjects in the design school.