Category: Architecture
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Eric Gill at Moorfields
I haven't said a great deal here about my current workplace, Moorfields Eye Hospital, but this is perhaps worth mentioning. There's an Eric Gill bas relief outside, showing The giving of sight to Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52). It's on the facade of the 'new' building, started in 1933. It is now not so prominent, as the main…
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Machines for reading in
In his post Bibbly-O-Tek, on his splendid blog, Nasty Brutalist and Short, sometimes known as Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy, Owen Hatherley discusses library architecture, including Senate House and the British Library, in a way that I wish one could read in the voluminous discussions on library planning and design in our professional…
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Senate House
I was at the WESLINE colloquium yesterday, and a report will be yours as soon as I have written it. In the meantime, these picture of Senate House will have to do. Even though they wouldn’t give me a job a while back, I still love the building. It reminds me a great deal of…
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Clocks
Admirable as Spence’s University of Sussex campus is, why are there no clocks? I was out running and needed to look up the time. There is a clock on the tower of Falmer church, but that is not visible from the campus.
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Basil Spence
The University’s website tells me that Basil Spence was born 100 years ago today. I shall celebrate with a lunchtime look at some of my favourite bits, to wit the cloisters outside the Arts A/B building.See here for my account of a meeting in 2004 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the University Library where…
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Whitechapel
“Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy” is both an insult shouted at Ramsay McDonald by James Maxton of the ILP and a rather fine blog on architecture, culture and politics, under the undoubtedly true epigraph, “there is something aphrodisiac about wet concrete”. In a recent post the author discusses “David Adjaye’s great, Scheerbartian Whitechapel…
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Designing libraries
I should have known about this ages ago, but it’s very good: http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk/
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Brighton and Hove libraries in Update
The latest issue of Update is a theme issue on library architecture and includes (in dead tree only, I’m afraid) articles on the Brighton Jubilee library and the refurbishment of Hove library.
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Pevsner online
When will someone put the whole of Pevsner online? I mean the architectural historian Nikolaus, not the fictional one-legged footballer Baldy Pevsner. The thought came to me when browsing the public library’s copy of the Sussex volume, written with Ian Nairn. I know they’re out of date, but even so. It was also be fun…
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University of Sussex architecture in the Independent
This morning’s Independent carries a story on the architecture of the University of Sussex campus. The author, Jay Merrick, doesn’t like the BSMS building I fear: “..a white box with the kind of domed roof you see on trading estates. Its blockwork façades are barnacled with ugly metalwork, and there is an even more overwrought…